A year ago, I was getting ready to spend a semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was nice, in the cold of January, to have the excitement of soon setting foot in a new country (where, coincidentally, it was also summer). Back in northern North America, aside from the expectation of spring, I suppose it can be a little depressing to wait through the long days of winter; on top of that, there's also the realization that with this spring will come my graduation from Fordham. It's certainly a lot to wait in expectation of, and it's certainly enough to make the present winter feel particularly long.
I find that, when things seem gray, it's always fun to notice little things that make life exciting. My favorite Argentine author (Jorge Luis Borges) has a great line in his story "El sur" ("The South"): "A la realidad le gustan las simetrías" ["reality likes symmetries"]. It's implied in the story that the "reality" being referred to is a dream state. Well, great literature certainly plays with the distinction between reality and dreams, and I like to think of Borges's observation as true in real life as well. For example: last semester I met a Swedish Fordham student named Fabian. The other day I remembered that Fabián was the name of the man who worked in my apartment building in Buenos Aires and that my hostess had a Swedish husband.
It is true that a productive life involves a lot of work. As they say: if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. At any rate, "life is very long", as T.S. Eliot reminds us in his poem "The Hollow Men"; if we must fill the useless moments with something, we might as well fill them with the poetry of every day, which is, after all, the only poetry.