Walking in the snow is balm to the jagged nerves that the holidays tend to exacerbate. While it was snowing a couple of days ago, I went out for a walk to think about things. Into all lives a certain amount of chaos will always fall: people get older, they get sick and die, or they spend extended amounts of time in the process of dying. This isn’t morbid, it’s just real. The snow falls and reminds me that the seasons change, time goes by, we all get older, everything changes, nothing stays the same except the snow. Walking in the snow reminded me of all the other times in my life that I have walked in the snow–in Minnesota, in Spain, in Texas, in Nevada, in Canada. The snow is silent, gentle, and impersonal–it falls on the just and the unjust equally, and it always will. It covers the sleeping landscape, giving the earth a chance to sleep under an icy blanket, a white death shroud that lovingly envelops everything. When you walk in the snow, you become a part of the shroud, you are a part of death, the silence of the falling snow, the eternity of a single moment. A single snow flake is proof that the entire universe moves towards lowest energy, towards entropy, and we are only incidental players on a universal stage.