more weather needed

New schools these days are built like boxes – bulky, cement cubes that conserve energy the same way a thermos maintains temperature: reduced interaction with the air outside.

It’s an odd logic that seals off children from the very world they’re learning about. Sensory deprivation may render even mundane lessons interesting, but shutting a child away from the God-given light of day for seven straight hours seems downright inhumane. Know what it’s like to exit a movie theater into a bright, sunny afternoon? Children feel that way every time they emerge from their corporate-gray, central-air schools, clueless about what the day has looked like.

I’m more fortunate than that – my school, built in the sixties, has wall-to-wall windows in every classroom. Invariably, every winter, I spy snowflakes while my students are concentrating on an exam, and I murmur to them, “I don’t mean to distract you, but take a moment to glance outside quietly. It’s starting to snow.” Sure, it’s a clever way to maintain control – a preemptive strike that prevents the “snow sillies” by drawing the class into my own calm tone – but that’s not why I do it. Really it’s my way of saying, “Tests are important, but so is life. Sometimes you need to take a moment to watch life as it happens.”

Children come into the world ready to imbibe wonder in vast quantities – and what do we give them? Algebra problems. Vocabulary workbooks. Flashcards. Education becomes irrelevant when it loses touch with wonder.

The same goes for life. How often our scads of deadlines, piles of phone messages and multitudinous little to-do tasks drain our days of every hue! You go to bed without doing a single thing worth remembering.

So bring on a lightning storm, a hearty squall to tousle trees and howl against the windows! Anything to raise our eyes off flat black ink on flat white paper. Raise them up – watch space unfold into vibrant dimension. Not one ceiling in the world holds a candle to the sky.

Infants know this – just carry them outdoors and watch their eyes sparkle. The transition from a tight, hot womb to an airy world is a shock, but once they adjust, babies develop a fever for openness. How spectacular the outdoors are to them, so unlike the womb – no walls, no ceiling, just wide, soft grass beneath a spreading sky and the vast reaches of the cosmos.

Sadly, we lose that sense of wonder as we age, driven by our agendas into well-worn routines. It takes a good power outage, snowstorm, or approaching hurricane to knock us back into awe at the mystery and power of life. I think that’s why weather reports are so often inflated – not just for ratings, but out of an unremitting hope for an experience larger than ourselves, a display of natural might to make us feel like kids again.

So let the thunder rumble all around, pressing in the thick and humid air. Let blizzards freeze our cars in place, tornadoes send us huddling down in flashlight-eerie basements. We need our roads awash in swelling creeks, and gusts to dance with traffic lights …

So much tends to muffle life; we need more weather to shake us all awake.