Winter has slowly and surely worn us down.

Everyone we know is sick, getting sick, recovering from being sick, or keeping a low profile to avoid getting sick.  Our limbs feel heavy as granite, these days, and our lungs like over-filled vacuum cleaner bags.  We are briefly duped by a weak sunbeam on our face, but a second later the wind off the river is an assassin’s blade, trying to bury itself in any glimpse of exposed flesh.

Endless cycles of freeze-and-melt have left us unsure of the ground beneath our feet.  In the morning’s blue light, we walk on surfaces as slick as an oiled mirror, scattered with the diamond-sharp teeth of winter’s hungry hounds.  By early afternoon, we are wading through ankle-deep streams of brown slurry.  Shattered Christmas decorations, chocolate bar wrappers, syringes, plastic figurines, and dog turds emerge from the melting snow like boring archeological artifacts, the remnants of a long-dead, tedious civilization, waiting to be catalogued.  Used condoms glimmer like fossilized jellyfish in the last rays of the dying sun.

What better time, then, to embrace the desolation and seek comfort in the gloom? Everything has its season.  If ever you were to give yourself permission to slip the surly bonds of duty, now is the time to do it relatively guilt-free.  These are the sorts of grey days and long, long nights that are made for moving slowly through.

So, let’s give ourselves permission to drift aimlessly through time.

In spring and summer, we will once again be fully engaged in the tumbling joy of living.  Throughout fall and early winter, we will throw ourselves into our various pursuits; our hammers will ring upon the forges of our enterprise and shower the world with sparks.

For now, though, we must conserve our energies, doing no more than what is absolutely required in order to survive.  The hours won’t waste themselves, you know.  We must leave crossword puzzles half finished and binge-watch Scandinavian murder shows.  We must linger in each other’s arms for far too long.  We must wear toques indoors, eating bowls of popcorn on the couch, blankets wrapped tight about our shoulders.  Perhaps, if we are moved by a wild ambition, we may bake some scones, or learn how to knit, or go for a walk in the half-lit woods.

It is a foul slander that idle hands are the Devil’s helper.  If anyone is busy, He is.  We can see evidence of His dark industry flashed across our screens from all around our world.  If anything, that fucker never sleeps.

No, blessed are the dreamers and the laziest of sods.  Tell me I’m wrong: anything of value crafted by our hands and brains started as a lighthearted and joyful whim.

And try not to worry: the world will surely keep turning, even as we’re shirking.  Even as we’re taking time for dreaming, planets will still swing through their orbits.  The seasons will still change, and then change again.