Dark

It slips my mind how dark night can be.

Seriously, we have excessive light for a quarter of the year and then suddenly we are hurled into utter darkness. 

Beautiful sunset at 3 pm. 

Pretty soon I'll adjust and it won't matter. But now I'm having some challenges.

1. Sleeping. Since it gets dark by 4 pm, I'm ready for bed by 8 pm. It just feels like the day should be over.

2. Driving. You can't really see because we don't invest in street lights and there's fun black ice this time of year.

3. Eating. In the summer I forget to make dinner because it's light for so long. This time of year I'm ready to eat dinner at 5 pm. I just need someone to get it made by then.

4. Leaving the house. It's easy to hunker and hibernate. Sophie and I have quite the string of cribbage games going.

Other than those minor challenges, we adjust and try to maintain healthy rituals.

It's hard to sneak a walk in while it's still light so I find myself walking the dog in the dark quite often. On a normal cloudy day, the lights of the city are trapped and it's relatively light out. We've had a stretch of clear days so I'm freezing my booty off and it gets really dark. And I mean dark. And I don't believe in flashlights; they ruin your night vision.

On Sunday night,  I went to the local campground in the pitch dark to walk the dog. It was dark and no one was around. When I say dark, I mean barely see the ground kind of dark. I sat in the car making my list of why I should go back home:
1. It's dark
2. It's cold
3. I'm slightly terrified of being attacked either by a pack of wolves or the monster who lives under the ice in the lake and whispers to me as I walk by. Rationality is not my strong suit; imagination is. 

I have a great coping skill when the voices in my head start telling me not to do something. I do whatever it is they are trying to talk me out of to spite them. 

If spite isn't a good reason to face discomfort and fear, then learning to be brave should be.

I don't think courage comes naturally so I try to do things that make me uncomfortable if not terrified. If I can talk down my voices making excuses for inaction and comfort in little things, then maybe I can stand up to those voices in true tests of courage. 

Like the fight at the middle school today. It was uncomfortable and scary to intervene, but necessary so I did. I started a list of all the reasons I shouldn't get involved, which obviously made me get out of my car and get involved.

We often confess in the church, "The light shines in the darkness" but if you never hang out in the dark how do you know?