The porcelain, mere inches from the steamy water, was cool to the touch. I dipped cupped hands and splashed my face, then watched my fingers as the warmth left them through the evaporating water.
A thought pushed its way in: that we constantly fight for light and warmth in contrast to the cold and dark. That this contest is what defines us. Warmth is generated, but the generation has limits and is ephemeral. The cold everywhere waits to take the heat away and dilute it; separate it from us.
Can this struggle change our impression of the world? We fear snakes and sharks, and other life we perceive as cold-blooded, more than we fear far deadlier, but warmer creatures like tigers and bears. Perhaps the idea of being lost to cold predators is scarier than the idea of dying itself; as if the act would be doubly cold; more permanently, hopelessly, fatal.
It's true we love the feel of fresh, cold air; brisk inhalations that energize. But that is only with brief exposure, and from a place of secure warmth; offer us nothing but cold air to breath forever and watch us run away. We need fires to look out from, to return to; for their sheltering heat.
Perhaps change is a kind of perceived coldness too. It may be welcome in small, bracing, energizing doses, but feared when it threatens to tear down entirely our shelters from the cold. Add a room extension on a house in midwinter and you can embrace the change, warm in your existing rooms; tear down the house to rebuild everything and you are left exposed.
Familiarity is warmth and security; we tend to accept change only slowly and carefully - unless everything is taken away; unless nothing familiar remains. Then we may embrace the cold. Then change becomes the only thing.
The next time you are in a bath, reach out and touch the porcelain or ceramic or metal near you, and reflect on how the difference between that coolness and the heat of the water mirrors the Change in your life, or your fight against it.
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