It’s snowing! And aside from a few snow showers in the midst of our late Fall season, this is the first snow of 2006. 
Today’s snow is so special and daunting that I decided to take the morning off from teaching. Since I gave my 60 day notice (yes, 60) to the company that I am currently running in Boston, it’s been hard to get myself motivated to keep pace. I’m having visions of computer land in the morning, and today that morning is a reality.
The weather channel eats this stuff up, and they love to tell me that it’s going to turn to rain this afternoon. Only 2 degrees colder and we could have been shut down! This winter has been, and will be indoubtedly milder than last year. Last year we had several power outages, and one or two shut-ins, which were to say the least, a blast!
I’m pressed for time and have to get ready for teaching the munchkins how to groove. I’ll leave you with Segment #1 of a short paper I once wrote. It will be published in 4 parts…let’s get philosophical!
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This life. What does it bring us? We are present on this earth for such a finite time, that we are told anything is achievable. Our society has given us the impression that to succeed is to go to college to earn high grades, or secure a job at a corporation to earn a high salary. Our religious institutions have proposed values for humanity to live by, all the time preaching that life is sacred and life is truth. While our life is the only real truth we can grasp, the inner truth comes from understanding the root.
True Life is a mother giving birth. This process is painful, more painful than any process of life. The child, however, is something radically new. It represents the potential of human life as something great. Life, in this sense, is innocent. The child has been exposed to this world for such a finite amount of time that this child is reborn in every moment. Though, Nietzsche would say that all life follows this path. The child represents all life, but does so in a purer sense.
The life of the new child represents existence as a sequence of events, but it is also fragmented. It is, at the same time, continuous and discontinuous. In each moment lies the potential for radical change. However, life as we know it is inherently guilty. The child is put in to a contaminated world, but with each new life there is more potential to overcome such a polluted society.
The child is the result of the final step of overcoming. Of course, this heart-wrenching and noble process can not simply be broken down in to three easy-to-follow steps, however, Nietzsche points out three distinct concepts that occur in the process of overcoming. The Three Metamorphoses describes these three stages. Life means to overcome itself, and to overcome is to create something markedly new. Nietzsche explains this in the third stage of metamorphoses:
To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion. To assume the right to new values — that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey. As its holiest, it once loved ‘Thou-shalt’: now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture. But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child? (Zarathustra, 84).