Snow

I've been worrying about all this recent travel but something happened a few days ago that gave me a new perspective.

It was late Thursday night and I was walking through the center of London, going from Victoria Coach Station to Victoria Tube Station. It was snowing. Freezing cold, I was bundled up in sweater and scarf and coat and two hats (yes two hats) and hood. I kept my head down as I studied the pavement under me, trying not to slip while still walking as fast as possible.

The snow was coming down in blizzard condition, thick and fast and blurry. It's only a short walk from the coach station to the tube but I was trying to make it as short as possible.

Then it suddenly occurred to me. For all that I was born in London, raised and educated here, with London stamped into the very fabric of my existence, I've never walked through the city center while it was snowing. This was the first time in my life I was experiencing it.

I looked up. The street lights gave the snow a mellow glow as it fell on the trees and lamp posts and stone porticos. The snowflakes twinkled as they flurried around the red double-decker bus that rolled past, like tinkerbells discovering a magical object. And as the flakes continued on down to the pavement, they hovered over the ground like fat white bees before dropping, becoming part of the blanket that covered everything.

Everywhere I looked white glowed at me. It was ethereal and real at the same time. Like I'd stepped into a fairytale that I knew was truth.

As I walked, my gaze followed the snowflakes on their path down to the pavement and I saw something else. I noticed that there were little dark objects that were moving over the ground. To my bemused mind I was thinking it strange that there were insects here in the middle of winter. But then the penny dropped and I realised that they weren't insects, they were the shadows cast by the snowflakes.

Shadows cast by snowflakes.

I stood frozen. Not once in my life had I considered that something so small - so temporal - might still be significant enough to cast a shadow.

The city of London that I knew so well - that was part of me - was teaching me something.

They say every flake is unique, that no two snowflakes look the same. But every snowflake follows the same path, falling from the sky amidst wind and rain and streetlamps and buses. They're buffeted from side to side by the currents around them yet still they fall, racing towards the inevitable.

Maybe we're all snowflakes. Destined to fall and in falling we buffet and flurry around all the things that pass us in life. But before we reach our journey's end we cast our shadow, a brief moment in time when we tell the world we existed. When our individuality triumphs and WE SIMPLY ARE.

And then we reach our brothers and sisters on the ground. We join together, mixing our unique selves to the mass of our brethren, becoming a part of the whole that we had only dreamed of before. In our very unity we fill the world with our glow. We blanket everything, connecting the tree to the bus, the wind to the wall, the streetlamp to the townhouse.

We become the world - so beautiful that it hurts to look.

As I stood there on a late London night, my breath frosting the air before me and the snowflakes settling on my eyelashes and lips, connecting me to the ground and the sky and the tree, I felt right. I felt at peace. I felt at purpose.