Lazy Snow's Lessons

Two weeks ago, I sat in my AP Government class, thinking about whether I preferred the summer or winter. At first, there was no debate nor doubt in my mind. I loved the winter - if I was inside. I also terribly missed it. Winters in the Northeast are beautiful, and in Virginia, though not as snowy and icy, winter automatically means snow days. I have always found snow days to be my most productive days. Watching the lazy snow motivated me to be all the more focused, and bright like the snow’s albedo. So, I declared that I preferred winter over summer, with such conviction.

10 days later, precisely, and I never want to see winter ever again. Somehow, my conviction and expression of adoration for winter has led us to the icy truth of it all. As I prefaced before, winter really is the best season - that is if we are inside. It holds true when electricity is not an issue. When water is not an issue. When we need not worry about pipes freezing and bursting. When heat is a nonissue. When the temperatures are not scarily teetering above zero and dropping below, with seemingly no end to this horrid weather.

The events of the past week have me convinced that winter truly can be punishing. Throughout what is one of the worst winter monsters we have gone through here, it was never winter’s issue, but the lack of preparation on our part, as a city, state and community. Even living in the northeast could not prepare us for what happened. Pipe insulation was never an issue, and neither was running water, or badly maintained power grids.

I realized that there is always some amount of preparation that can be done. Ironically, there is always that one element we can never see nor plan for. It is the surprise that excites us, and frustrates us. Being someone who frets over planning, feeling the need to write millions of lists with the same items and to-do events, simply re-ordered by different prioritization parameters, it is very challenging to be laissez-faire.

This week, there was only so much we could do to protect our pipes from freezing - heating our kitchen with space heaters, and keeping a drip for our faucets. Ideally, we would have to know exactly at what rate the water needed to leave our faucets to keep the water moving constantly so as to not give it ample time to freeze. Ideally, we would have continuous power to ensure our exposed walls would not have the time to let heat escape, allowing water to freeze faster. However, none of the above ideal cases came true. I realized that planning is important, as we diligently guarded and kept our water running, but we could not plan for a power outage, nor for bad insulation in the construction of the house itself.

I also had a pause for thought regarding gratitude. When people want to become advocates of change, it starts with addressing the problem, voicing concerns, and expressing the need for change. They may or may not bring producible results immediately, but they take the first step - awareness of the problem. Yet, people who do not understand the significance of that particular problem simply claim that these advocates of change are complaining and that they should be more positive. On the same note, it is declared that they must show more gratitude, and stop complaining. However, without finding an issue with an element of society, the problem will never come to light. Therefore, it is necessary that this so-called complaining never seizes because the moment it does, society will never find the need to bring change.

Modern Gratitude and Modern Positivity are built on selfishness. Today’s gratitude is feeling thankful for those objects that we possess. Today’s positivity is feeling thankful for what we have and ignoring what we do not. Both exist because of materialism and the idea of possession. The fact that we want to feel thankful for having something implies that at least one other person does not, therefore we are feeling happy not about this object that we have, but that we do not have the problems others are facing. Similarly, positivity today means that we ignore the problem at hand. Being truly positive takes great strength and courage because it requires that we acknowledge the problem, understand it, realize that it is a significant problem that needs change, and believe that change is possible. Today’s positivity claims that we disregard the problem completely. Ignoring the issue, and turning away from it, pretending it does not exist is quite easy. So, how can today’s positivity be true positivity?

None of this is to explain what watching lazy snow made my mind lazy, but how it inspired me. Inaction often makes me unnecessarily anxious, and lack of internet increased this sentiment greatly. The three days of this feeling encouraged me to make progress, since regardless of whether or not Modern Gratitude and Modern Positivity exist, producible results are required. Our “adventures” taught me the importance of planning to the best of our abilities, but that it does not guarantee results. With that confidence, I was able to dive into Encoder architecture, and understand the “what” and the “why” behind multi-head attention and feed-forward networks. It fascinates how sentence meanings and contexts can be translated into numbers and weights, then back into words we understand.