A Meditation For Winter

A Meditation For Winter

I am wondering what to teach my children about winter. Beyond telling them that it is a cold weather season that black people don’t like. I don’t want them to be like my former self, afraid of the cold.

I was raised in a country dissected almost equally by the equator. In Kenya, we experience blue skies throughout the day and feel the sun’s warmth all year. You don’t appreciate this privilege until you move to the Northern hemisphere where talking about the weather becomes the daily conversation starter.  

From a young age, I associated cold weather with illness. I was pronouncing the word pneumonia long before I could spell it. 

“Don’t go out in cold weather, you will catch pneumonia”, my mother warned. 

Kenyan mothers fear the cold and every time they feel a chill, the children must wear an extra jacket. 

People born in the tropics develop a sunny disposition and it becomes one of the first things you begin to lose when living in cold countries. Against your strongest instincts, your behaviour gets regulated by the seasons, dull and closed in winter, warm and bubbly in summer. 

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