Tired of being cold

I am back to wearing a wool cardigan over another sweater and my winter coat when outside, which I was a lot today. I am kind of done with the cold and the wind... particularly the wind. Last week, when the weather was a bit warmer, it crossed my mind that perhaps I would take my disgusting, barn-smelling winter coat and wash it. Like so much in my life, I never got around to it, and now I'm glad I didn't. Procrastination pays off again. 

A book I have been reading had a chapter about saunas and the nordic countries seeming need for them. Now, I've never quite understood saunas. Why on earth would someone voluntarily sit in an uncomfortably hot and steamy room? It has never sounded appealing. At all. I actually cannot think of anything that sounds less appealing except perhaps a tropical rain forest where it is hot, humid, the bugs are the size of your head, and your skin grows fungus. Can you tell I'm just not a heat and humidity type of person?

Then earlier this week, as I was all stiff and huddled over because it's April and it just doesn't seem right to dress for late February, saunas suddenly made sense. The cold was making me tense all over trying to keep warm and all I wanted to do was sit in the sun and just relax in some warmth. And for a moment, sitting in a sauna -- voluntarily -- made a lot more sense. If you live somewhere that is pretty much either cold or super cold, you need somewhere you can relax your muscles and just breath. Especially in earlier times when central heating was an unattainable dream and even your home didn't really give you that place to relax in warmth, having somewhere you could seems essential. 

I realized that I was coming at saunas from a completely different perspective. I haven't lived in the hot desert for quite a while now, but I am sometimes surprised at how it influences my thinking. For so much of my early life, the question wasn't how to get warm, but how to cool off. Working around the heat, how to live in the extreme heat was a far more pressing question. Even having moved to a more temperate climate, humid summers often found me wishing for fall, and while the winters were cold, the house was warm.

And then we acquired animals who need more than a quick trip outside every so often; animals which required me to spend far more time than I was used to out in the cold. It has completely changed my perspective. Maybe saunas don't seem quite so insane after all.