Unnatural - January 6, 2012

Anya romped in what remains of the snow at the park near my son's school. There was a golden retriever there named Jake, whom we've met before. I also took Anya to the dog park in the early afternoon. It was unnaturally warm for January, yet again, and will be for some time to come.

Why unnatural? We use that word to mean "not normal," as if nature should conform itself to norms we decide upon. I mean, yes, humans have begun seriously pushing the global temperature up, and so we will have more above "average" temeratures in our winters. But the actual weather, the warm-this-week-and-snow-on-Wednesday stuff, is a process we cannot do much of anything about, except get out of its way. It is the ultimate "natural" phenomenon — it does what it does because... that is what weather does by its nature.

What we humans do, when we get our act together, is try and see patterns. We identify seasons—I'm organizing this writing around those seasons. We detect fronts traveling across the landscape and expect precipitation. We figure out what is "normal" and make our plans accordingly. For example, in Minnesota, we plan to learn to ski in January—it's a pretty safe bet that that will be a good month for learning to ski. We get out our warm clothes.

And then it's freakishly warm. How dare the weather break its pattern! we mutter, as if that isn't exactly what the weather does most of the time.

In winter, our bodies want to slide off into a long hibernatory mode. Maybe this is the root of Seasonal Affective Disorder... When its dark, we don't want to just turn the lights on and behave the same. Yet, here I am at 1 am, writing a blog.

We create normal, and then we want to enforce it back on ourselves. We get up and go to school at the same time by the clock, not by the sun. We try and keep our houses at the same temperature year-round. This desire for an even keel is perhaps why we keep trying to make ourselves an inside world—we like to be able to return to "normal" at will.

But maybe a reliance on normal blinds us to when the underlying "natural" has changed...