We Can Have Oranges in Winter
It was all of 8 degrees F here when I went out for a walk this morning.
When I came back in with my face all red and almost numb, I unwrapped the 3 layers of insulation I had swaddled myself in and hung it up.
And then I ate an orange.
Isn’t our civilization marvelous? Here it’s winter (I don’t care what the calendar says) and there’s a lot of snow on the ground and I’m eating an orange. I’m doing something that, for almost all the preceding hundreds of thousands of years of human history, no one at this latitude, regardless of their amount of wealth, could have done. No English king or Japanese emperor or Russian czar around the year 1300 AD, say, would have been able to eat a fresh orange in the winter unless they traveled to where they were grown — an epic journey at the time. It was easy this morning for me. And this particular orange was actually obtained in Kansas, where you can’t grow oranges. And just about any of you reading this — from Juneau, Alaska to Bangor, Maine — could have done the same thing. All you’d have to do is hand over a dollar or two.
Icicles, snow
In essence it’s “wealth” and choice that would have been unfathomable a few hundred years ago.
As I’m eating this orange, the eave of a house along my street looks like this:
Our civilization is rife with such privileges and satisfactions. So much so that we hardly give them a second thought. Yet consider all the things that had to be accomplished for me to enjoy that juicy orange this morning as the mercury hovered in the singe digits — accomplished not only recently but for a long period beforehand.
My mind tends to make stray connections, so I was thinking about this in the context of some comments I came across on Youtube. I’d been watching some of the posted videos from the movie Braveheart, in particular the “freedom” speech that inspires the Scots before the battle of Stirling Bridge (such as this one) and in the comments from viewers, tucked in amongst the usual ungrammatical invective and bickering, some guys said that they wished they were alive back then and could have taken part in that battle (on the side of the Scots, I assume), rather than being alive today, when there is nothing meaningful to do and people are just concerned about what they can buy. It occurred to me that, since we are essentially spiritual beings who live forever, most of us were alive back then and experienced those conditions, albeit in different bodies. And some of us did fight in that battle and in other battles, because we wanted freedom. The freedom to be, to do, to have, to create. And now we are enjoying the fruits of that labor.
I understand those guys who say they wished they could be there. They want something that will bring forth the best in themselves. But consider: there is always another level of freedom to seek, for as it is achieved at one level, new possibilities occur. For men, there are other ways to express one’s best besides battles. (Battles just get the bulk of the publicity. Movies aside, true fulfillment on the battlefield is elusive.) Battles are are not an end in themselves. What we want is to eat an orange in the winter.
What new things will we be enjoying a few hundred years from now?
There are still things around that can be used to inspire the best in ourselves. Pick something – whatever feels good to you – and pursue it.
And get some great oranges from Florida or Texas this winter…
