Getting back to being human in the cold of winter
Friends’ first cold snap an eye-opener, says John M. Richardson.
As a dad and a high school teacher, I have a close-up view of the ways in which digital technology is interwoven through teenagers’ lives.
Although it brings incredible advantages, I worry that the many hours young people spend in front of screens can separate them from the natural world and give a false impression of what it means to be human.
I was thinking about this while scraping ice off the inside of my car’s windshield, something my Texan friend had never seen before.
“That’s a new one,” he marvelled as the frost flew. Let me explain. Mike is a former U.S. navy flyer. Prior to living in Orlando, Fla., he was stationed in Hawaii and the Florida Panhandle. His experiences of cold involve an overcast January day in Orlando or a stroll through an air-conditioned mall in August.
Maureen is originally from Vancouver, where a light snowfall can throw the city into disarray. They travelled from their Florida home to spend Christmas in Ottawa with my family and experience a true Canadian winter.
Did Mother Nature ever deliver.
They arrived on Christmas Eve, when the mercury hovered at -10 C. We loaned them winter coats and woollies, Mike put on a knitted, giraffe-shaped hat he had pulled from the back of Maureen’s closet and we walked to mass.
As we crunched along the gritted sidewalk, Mike asked how it could be both below freezing and damp at the same time. I told him I wondered the same thing.
On Christmas Day, we stayed inside and Mike commented on the house’s coziness. Fifteen people for a roast turkey dinner and a jacked-up thermostat will do that. Truth is, our old house struggles in the cold. The furnace runs more or less constantly. Ice forms around the gaps and seams in our windows. On Boxing Day, there was fresh snow, the mercury fell to -21 C and we introduced our guests to shovelling. Mike said it was a lot of fun to do. Once.
Dec. 28 was our friends’ last day and we took them for a walk along the Rideau Canal. There was an extreme cold warning in effect and the temperature fell to -27 C with a wind chill of -37 C.
Crunching along the bike bath, the breeze against our skin felt like knives. Mike’s giraffe hat grew sadly inadequate and, wiping the tears from his eyes, he reminisced about the survival training he had undergone in the U.S. military.
“It was nothing compared to this,” he murmured.
We later read that the extreme cold spell had been given its own hashtag: #HypoThermageddon2017.
And this is the connection to my students.
In class recently, my students discussed a report suggesting that artificial intelligence will soon permit computers to write New York Times bestsellers, compose top-40 pop songs and conduct surgery. Countless jobs will be obliterated. Others not yet even considered will emerge from the virtual wreckage.
In some ways, my students are sanguine about the pending upheavals because their life experiences are inseparable from digital technology. It’s all they have known. Their school work, personal lives, identity formation and self-exploration are all done at least in part via screens.
Scraping the ice off my windshield and walking by the canal as the pale sun glistened in a cool blue sky, I thought about how easy it can be for young people — for all of us — to lose sight of the fact that human life operates independently of digital technology.
We give the most severe winter weather in recent history an amusing hashtag in an attempt to draw the natural environment into our more easily managed world of posts, memes and updates.
The brutal reality of an Ottawa winter is a visceral, sometimes painful reminder that we are fragile, vulnerable and #human.