Most of the time it’s pretty cold out there, especially walking past Lake Mansfield, the Great Barrington town lake. Sometimes the water freezes up enough to take your weight and it’s possible to walk on the lake. However, you can’t always tell exactly how frozen it is simply by looking and if you’re not very careful, you might end up in the lake rather than on it. I do not recommend this.
As I have written in this space before, walking is an integral part of staying alive. We need to stay healthy by moving and exercising our muscles. Naturally, it makes sense to protect your body parts with the right clothing. But that so-called proper clothing may change from day to day as the weather does. After all, your hands and toes and other extremities remain at the mercy of the elements. If you are not careful, the cold will catch up with you, and you may end up putting yourself in real danger. This has certainly happened in the past and can create real problems.
One of the reasons why face masks are so important is that it does not take long for parts of your face, including your nose, lips, and tongue, to freeze and create not only discomfort but the possibility of real damage to your body. When I walk each day, I frequently see someone who is not properly protected from the cold. It seems clear to me that, too often, we humans ignore the potential danger that we face in the course of living. Think of all the fighting forces that have not paid proper heed to protecting their bodies. As a result, many soldiers have suffered great harm. Likewise, we hear a lot about our propensity to hurt ourselves as a result of exposure to the elements.
We know that we can harm ourselves, and we are certainly aware, as we prepare to exit our warm places, that we have an obligation to cover ourselves and to protect our sensitive skin. And yet too many of us don’t take the simplest precautions, probably because we have a false sense of security and, on some level, consider ourselves invincible. I suspect that we have always fooled ourselves about what we need to do when we are most threatened. So, why do we do this? What is it about the human psychology that tricks us into fooling ourselves?
If I walk with my gloves in my pocket and not where they belong on my hands, I find that, when I return to the safety of my home, my fingers and hands are not hurting the way I might expect that they would be. Maybe the answer to all of this is that we tend to fool ourselves and that is just plain dumb. This year has been a real study in fooling ourselves. Our false expectations about the weather can lead us into real trouble and it turns out that we are capable of doing real harm to ourselves.
Back when I was a kid and taking music lessons from Mr. Steiker on 78th Streetand Riverside Drive, I thought that there was no colder place on earth than on that corner. In fact, Steiker regularly made us walk up to Broadway and buy him hotdogs. (He paid.) Perhaps that’s why I truly believe that they’re no delicacy more delicious in the world than franks on a roll covered with sauerkraut and mustard. The difficulty of the trip from Riverside Drive to Broadway could not have been matched by anything less than climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. Of course, if you refused Steiker’s request to get the stuff, you risked a kick in the shins. I loved the guy.
