Buried Under but Digging Out

Many people ask me, "How do you survive in South Bend with all of the snow"? I said to one recently, the same way you survive in life, I keep Digging out".

I wrote in my "It's Almost February post that we had received 40.5 inches of snow, something to that effect. By South Bend standards, a wimp of a winter. I thought I had escaped. This was January 30th. Then February rolled around.

With almost 5 days left in the month we have received 34.1 inches of snow in the month of February. We are only 1.4 inches away from breaking the record of the snowiest February of all time eclipsing a record that has stood since 1908.It was just yesterday I was laughing about how good it was, daring to point my finger at lake Michigan and the so called Lake effect snow and call them WIMPS. Then February came.

I write this because maybe you can relate. Just yesterday life was great, sun was shining, warm weather abounded. No major problems, burdens,or health concerns. Tax refund on the way, looking at vacation destinations and 70" TV's for the man cave and then it hit, the phone call that a loved one has passed, another announcing health concerns that won't be a quick fix,,, the tax refund now has been held up due to an audit of a tax dispute from 4 years ago

One problem on top of another problem. Before you can fix one another shows up, before you can clean off your desk, here comes another file, before this argument is settled, up pops another issue and you become buried under.A record day, week, month of problems you have never seen before. You become buried under.

The question becomes How do I deal with this Mountain of,,,,snow, burdens, problems, etc. Well let me give you the bad news first, IT'S NOT MAGICALLY GOING TO GO AWAY!! I can stick my head in the sand like an Ostrich but things will only become worse.

South Bend winters have taught me a necessary life principle: Live in between the waves. With a report of 2-4 inches of system snow today and lake effect of 1-3 tonight, an Alberta clipper that will drop 3- 5 this weekend with another 4-8 of lake effect after that, sometimes you only have hours, or days to dig out before the next one hits.

If you don't dig out from this snowfall, it will freeze and become too hard to move. You will have move-able snow on top and an ice chunk on the bottom. So we dig out. Snow blowers, plows, shovels and picks, we dig. Neighbors help each other, we push people out of driveways or dig people out stuck in the cul-de-sacs but we dig out.

We can't move all of the snow. That's an impossibility, so we dig enough to clear a path, a parking spot or a place. Let me encourage you, some problems will not be solved by ignoring them, nor will you be able to remove everything bad out of your life al at once, but if you can dig a place, a path, a parking place so that when the next wave hits you won't have to move twice as much, life will get better.

Dig out, don't get buried under.