Ice and Electricity
The build up of ice all over finally took it’s toll last night when we lost power around 9:30PM. Luckily I was prepared and knew exactly where my faithful headlamp was. After a few minutes of walking around and turning on light switches as I went into rooms I finally sat down. I could still do work the old fashioned way, with a pen and paper but my mind drifted off as I thought about ice and electricity.
After awhile I decided I may as well head to bed because I figured it would be the normal 3 hours until we would have power again. Sometimes the power will go right back on, or be a quick fix. Good thing I didn’t wait up because we didn’t get power back on until after 1:00AM some time. Not a bad time to have a power outage if you’re going to have one. The weather wasn’t fiercely cold and the house stayed plenty warm for us to survive without our electric heat.
The danger of ice was on my mind. Cars careening out of control, tree branches bending and breaking from the weight and my friend Diane who almost died last month from falling on an ice skating rink and cracking her head open.
It was a freak accident and she’s doing pretty well now despite the fact she can’t taste or smell anything. She was taking a group of foreign workers ice skating for their first time and wanted to take some pictures of them. She purposefully decided not to put her ice skates on until after she took the photos so she wouldn’t fall down. She thought she would be safer in her boots, but she thought wrong.
She slipped, hit her head and remained conscious for a few minutes before blacking out. The rink is just minutes from the local hospital and she was transported there in a jiffy. Seeing the need for immediate special attention they contacted life flight to pick her up and fly her to Duluth.
Initial reports didn’t sound good at all. Fractured skull, swelling on the brain, unconscious and unresponsive. You can imagine our suprise when we heard she was awake and had normal brain function. To us it is a miracle she is alive and to her it’s a silly accident that’s a bit embarassing.
Ice and electricity are similar in the sense they are both good and bad. They both provide good things and bad things. Take ice for instance it provides cold beverages, a place to skate, a surface to go fishing on, a habitat for cold weather animals and much more I’m sure. But it also can cause problems and death if it’s covering roads, trees and power lines.
Then there’s electricity that supplies us with energy to use all of the wonderful light and appliances that make our lives so easy. But electricity can cause burns, house fires and immediate death by electrocution.
And so it is with many things in life that can bring us both joy and pain depending upon the context. Some people are excited when they find out specific news and others are disappointed to hear the same thing. We can choose to react to some things but not to others because some things aren’t in our control, most things aren’t in our control. But we are in control of our thoughts and sometimes thinking differently is all it takes to make something bad into something good.
May you find the good in all you see and do today.