Venturing Into the Fog

I stepped out of the hotel’s door and into the parking lot, the wind and snow whipping around me like a miniature frozen tornado. I thought back to the previous day when I had stood in the same exact location on a crisp, sunny morning. I had watched the gondolas go up and down the mountain and seen the skiers as they traversed the powdery snow to the mountains’ base. The ski hill was no more than a thousand yards away from where I was standing, but today there was no mountain to be seen. 

We were in full-on whiteout conditions, with a snowy fog that made it impossible to see even the length of a football field. If I hadn’t seen the view of the mountain 24 hours earlier, I would have never known that there was anything special about this location. I certainly wouldn’t have known that one of my greatest pleasures, an activity that often makes me feel like I’m in heaven—skiing—was only a short walk away. In the midst of this storm, the parking lot where I stood was just a tiny, lifeless world of white and grey with no defining features, curtained off from the rest of the world.

As I pondered this strange weather pattern, I realized that sometimes our emotions have a similar effect on our ability to see things clearly. But instead of limiting our visual sight, it alters our ability to see reality as it truly is, temporarily robbing our inner world of wonder, joy and awe. I began to wonder how many times an emotional fog had blinded me from seeing something beautiful, remarkable or exciting. How many opportunities, insights or experiences had I missed out on? How many times had I been brooding or sulking right next to my proverbial heaven? Probably more times than I care to know about.

But negative emotions are a fact of life that we will all have to contend with for the rest of our lives. So what can we do about it?

Probably the most helpful thing is to simply identify that we are in a fog and that things are probably not as they seem. And after this identification, we likely need to do something. 

Sometimes it may be best to wait out the emotional storm before taking drastic action or passing judgment. Other times (in my opinion, most of the time), it is appropriate to actively work to clear the fog through physical exercise, meditation, breathing exercises, reading a good book (not reading something on your phone) or another activity that calms or resets the mind. But other times, it may be appropriate to take courageous action. In these situations, we have to strike out into the fog, ask for directions from others who might have a better vantage point, and we have to explore beyond our current field of vision. Who knows, we might just find our personal little heaven sitting just beyond the fog.