Saturday, December 26, 2009

Reflections on a Freezing Shower




There is always a hint of heat even on the coldest mornings as you stand shivering, hand tentatively outstretched under a reluctant, groaning stream. One chooses one’s moments and one must act quickly. You know this faint warmth will not last forever. And yet you think, this morning of all mornings, this very morning might hold constant and true with the promise of warmth. This first stage is hope.

It is too late to undo what has been done. This realization strikes you with the rapidly cooling water. You turn the dial slightly to the left, closer to the ‘H,’ but you don’t dare go all the way because once there, there’s nowhere further to go. And there’s heat in that dial that needs to be coaxed out, like milk from a reluctant Heifer’s teat. And so it goes. Once more to the left and you know you are getting close to the end, that soon that dial will not turn and you’ll be left, alone and naked, to reckon with what you’ve wrought. This happens every morning. This second stage is the confrontation with cold reality.

Just as you’ve resigned yourself to the cruelty, just as you’ve cursed - Job-like – your suffering, something happens. There is a trace of slight warmth in the torturous cascade – Is this delusion? Early hypothermia? Diminishing definitions of what is “warm” and what is “cold”? No, there is real heat there! The worm has turned and though you never end in a torrent of hot water, there is a wisp of steam in the bathroom as you exit marginally less frozen than when you entered some eight minutes ago. (Eight minutes! Was it only eight minutes?! Nay, two lifetimes!) Is this the virtue of patience? Is that what we’ve learned?

This pilgrim’s progress holds until you shower elsewhere. Somewhere where the stream is hot and pressured and you’re torn between thinking this comfort somehow decadent, and thinking, alternatively, that the narrative of morning ritual you live with is wholly misguided, that it needn’t be like that at all.

And then you have a good think.

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