January showers bring February flowers?

Ick. It's a disgusting day outside...rain. It's raining in January. Not even 2 weeks ago it was 0 degrees at 9am and we had so much snow, you could barely keep up with the shoveling. Now it's 35 and raining and brown.

Looking out my office windows I see a train, slowly creeping down the tracks. Chugga. Chugga. Chugga. Chugga. The interminable pace feels like a vision of the next two months. The train hasn't stopped, it's not stagnant, but the motion is slow...painfully so. Watching that train creep by, I wanted to go out there, put my hands on the caboose and push as hard as I could if only to move it a few seconds faster down the tracks. Sometimes though, we have to accept that things are out of our control...the train will make it to the station at the same rate no matter how hard you will it to move faster. But the key message is that the train WILL make it to the station eventually. At least passengers within get to not only see the entire scenery surrounding them, but they really get to absorb every detail in. Maybe the key is, as a passenger, to study every color, every texture, every movement, every smell. Perhaps a slow moving train, although at first is as frustrating as being stuck in gridlock LA traffic, can turn into an adventure of the senses.

When I was in Egypt, we were supposed to spend 3 days and 2 nights sailing up the Nile, making our way to Luxor. Due to heavy sand storms, we weren't able to sail much. We ended up spending the first night docked at this little Nubian Island on the Nile. At first, we sat on the boat playing cards and growing listless, frustrated that we weren't enjoying a beautiful sail up the Nile. Then my newly formed friend, Roberta, and I decided to get off the boat and explore. We ended up having the most amazing experiences - playing soccer with local kids, talking about farming and local businesses with a local man, smoking the sheesha (hookah) with some weathered elders, watching goats eat everything in sight. It ended up being one of the best parts of the trip. Something that began as a frustrating pause, a stall, a stagnation, ended up being full of life, color, experience, emotion.