The showers might be hot – or they might be cold. Even on the surface that’s ironic, but read on to get my take on it in this week’s edition of “Isn’t That Ironic?”.
Last year our local swimming pool put this sign in the men’s showers, “Caution: Showers might be hot”. Great! I like hot showers. Usually, it was an unfulfilled promise but sometimes the showers were hot. I chuckled that we needed a warning sign. Was it really necessary? Surely anyone old enough to read the sign and press the shower button was old enough to know you should test the water before you jump in. Maybe not.
This year they put up the sign that read, “Caution: Showers might be cold”. I haven’t noticed much change in the showers during all the years I’ve been swimming there. Once again, I wondered if anyone was daft enough not to know that the shower might be cool when you first turn it on. Didn’t they have showers at home?
But when both signs went up at once, I just had to write about it. Life’s kind of ironic like that isn’t it. Sometimes life is hot—sometimes cold. Sometimes we’re hot—sometimes we’re cold. Both are good, even necessary. In life as in showers, it doesn’t hurt to test the water before you jump in.
I like hot showers. I stand in them until the hot water runs out. Nothing wrong with cold showers, though. I’ve heard they’re good for you too. I have done a bit of cold water swimming in my days – mostly when I was younger. It’s supposed to have health benefits. I even swam out to a little iceberg once, in a frigid mountain lake. It was kind of foolish, and likely the closest I’ve ever come to death. It turns out your muscles atrophy when they get really cold – makes it hard to swim back to shore. I almost didn’t make it.
But we need both hot and cold in life. Even the Bible says to be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm. I think part of why we’re here on this earth is to experience the fullness of life: the hot and the cold, the triumphs and the tragedies, the ups and the downs. We need the contrasts.
It’s like music. We need consonance and dissonance, tension and resolution, largo and presto, forte and piano. For what is forte if there is no piano. Nothing really exists except in contrast to something else.
It’s a bit ironic that we need what we don’t want to make what we do want sweet. We need the tension in our relationships to make the resolution of our difficulties satisfying. If we never had problems, we wouldn’t appreciate the solutions. There would be no joy in triumph if we never experienced the bitterness of tragedy. We need the hot and the cold in life.
So don’t worry about your problems, don’t worry about your “hot and cold”, don’t worry about your imperfections. Just enjoy being the best “you” you can be. Not only is it OK to be ourselves, it’s perfect to be ourselves. We’re imperfect, and that’s perfect. Sometimes we’re hot, and sometimes we’re cold. We are here to experience both the hot and the cold of life. And that’s perfect!
God Bless You!
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