The Rough Ice of Life

If God gives you ice, go ice skating.

Thus my paraphrase of the classic lemon phrase.  Allow me to pause there for a moment, however, and suggest that rather than make lemonade with one's lemons, it might be more suitable simply to drink them in hot water or tea, as that is an excellent remedy for fighting off colds, as a former Russian roommate of mine once taught me.  Hence, if life gives you lemons, it might just be that you need them as a remedy against illness.

In context of that, let me return to my paraphrase with ice.  The thought arose yesterday because once again freezing rain fell upon the Northwest.  Now previously, I had discovered the marvels of roads being turned into an excellent place to ice skate, so I was determined that should such weather return, I would certainly take advantage of it again.

Road conditions, however, as you may perhaps be able to discern from the above picture, differed substantially from the previous thick, smooth layer of solid ice that seemed designed for anyone who happened to have a pair of skates.  Snow had fallen first this year and melted irregularly, leaving rough layers in stripes across the road.  The ice had further been torn up by the chains of vehicles that had driven by already that morning.  Furthermore, many places had not frozen sufficiently, but remained more snow than ice.  It looked quite treacherous.

Stubbornly, I insisted upon venturing out, determined that I would once again ice skate.  As I did, it occurred to me that most people would have given up at once simply from looking at the state of the icy road.  Any who had failed to assess accurately might have been the less cautious sort and therefore found themselves fallen upon the ice, leading them to quickly abandon their eagerness.

I, however, took it slowly, learning how to work with the rough ice.  Much of the time I had only one skate on solid ice while the other broke through, still providing leverage forward.  Sometimes I had short bits of smooth ice where I could really skate.  Yet I always had to be on my guard for the next place where the tire tracks crisscrossed the road with ice pebbles.  I kept low, ready to flail my arms about to catch my balance when I hit a place with more friction.

Miraculously, I returned to the house without having fallen once.

While I skated, though, in this unconventional manner, I thought of some of my favorite lines of poetry from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" that seemed to apply in a similar fashion:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

For I had taken that way less traveled (even though that is not in fact the point of the poem)—the way that few, if any, would have taken.  Yet that also seemed to me an analogy for the proper approach to life.  All too often in our lives we wait for the perfect smooth ice.  If I had done so, however, I would have missed a good morning of exercise and the excitement and adventure of doing what no one else would have done—and the story to tell of it afterward.