Why do something most people consider unproductive?

I grew up in North Carolina, where snow days were infrequent. Less than an inch of snow could get school canceled. Few locals knew how to drive in it, and even fewer owned snow shovels—there was no need.

Back in 2010, well before any of my books were published, one of my very first blog posts was about shoveling snow. I described visiting a farm in Maine with one of my high school classmates, who had also spent his whole life in North Carolina. When we were assigned the chore of shoveling snow out of a field so that the farm’s sheep had room to frolic, we both grabbed our shovels and dug out some space for the flock.

Neither of us complained, but by the end of the afternoon, when we were tired and sore, my classmate commented, “It is weird when you realize all you did today was relocate water.”

Some people, faced with a porch hip deep in snow, will struggle to see the point in relocating water. It’s easy to think, “You know, when spring comes, it’ll melt on its own. I don’t necessarily need to do anything.” 

You might also think, “Well, the snow is too deep for me to use the porch out there, but do I really need it right now? It’s pretty cozy inside.”

Temporarily, that may be the best option.

If it is still snowing, or if temperatures are well below 0 degrees F, or if the wind is blowing very hard, or if the weather is truly terrible in some other way, it’s probably not the best time to be shoveling snow.

If you have the flu and are running fever, it’s probably also not the best conditions for outside activities. Your body needs immediate care much more than the porch does.

But even though you may need to wait for decent conditions, waiting till spring has its own dangers.

Individual snowflakes are light. On your skin, you feel their cold, not their weight. But as snow accumulates, so does its density.

 ou may be okay with losing access to the porch until the spring melt, but you also don’t know when the next blizzard will hit. Eventually, the porch may begin to suffer under the extra weight. If that snow gets heavy enough, the structural integrity of the porch will fail, crumbling under that pressure.

You’ll either lose that porch space forever, or you’ll have to rebuild it completely.

Obviously, I am not just talking about snow and porches.

Frozen water is often used as a metaphor for stuck emotions, which accumulate through times of pain and trauma. (For example, in the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen had the ability to freeze hearts through shards of her broken mirror. If you’ve read the Ever Afters, you may remember how I used this in my own retelling of that story.)

Leaving old feelings untended is understandable. In the middle of a crisis, you’re dealing with challenges pressing in on you, and once those events pass, it’s tempting to stay inside your cozy house and just wait for those stuck emotions to melt away on their own.  

You tell yourself, “I don’t need to go out there right now,” and as I mentioned before, waiting for your moment is sometimes a good decision.

But the porch, weighed down by all that snow, is much like your overall mental health. Stuck emotions are weighing it down and putting stress on its structural integrity.

Both in our personal lives and in the news, we have all seen what happens when someone’s mental health suffers a complete collapse. Sometimes, their lives end in the most tragic of circumstances. Sometimes, they simply spend the rest of their lives with limited capacity. Sometimes, that individual spends years struggling to rebuild their mental health after that collapse.

Addressing transformation fatigue is one way you can relieve the stress of that stuck weight.

Others see you pausing to tend old emotions and wonder, “Why you are relocating water?”

You can remind yourself, “I am preventing collapse and reclaiming all the space available to me.”