Icy Night Musing.

The walk was a bit tricky tonight. Most of the lane surfaces were slippery, and who wants to risk a potentially injurious tumble when the forecast temperature is -10°C? Accordingly, it was necessary to keep finding areas of snow or frozen slush in the middle of the road or on the verges where they existed. And that led me (as is my want, poor sod) into two areas of musing.

When you consider what a massive range of temperatures the universe is capable of producing – from the unimaginable heat at the surface of the sun to the intense cold of outer space – how vulnerable it makes you feel to realise just what a tiny fraction of that range the human animal is capable of tolerating.

But then the constant changing of position to find safe ground had me reflecting on the following question: Allowing for rather more hazardous circumstances than those in which I was engaged, how should one approach a seriously hazardous journey? Is it better to draw strength and inspiration from a contemplation of the goal, or is it better to remove all thought of the destination and concentrate on each footstep?

I erred on the side of the latter, not least because, to the traveller, the destination doesn’t exist until he gets there. And what surer way is there of arriving safely than to focus on completing each step successfully?

This post has the tone of a sermon about it, don’t you think? Sorry. I reckon it comes from reading that bloody book Frankenstein. I finished it tonight. More on that later.