The Polar Vortex is some cold stuff. Sixty mile blizzard winds are blinding and biting. Two feet of snow is a back breaker.

But what bothers us as a society is not that it’s cold or there are white out conditions or that the snow is heavy. What bothers us is that it stops us from our pursuing our go-go-go life styles. These things are a big inconvenience.

Mother Nature is not going to dictate what I do and don’t do. Who does she think she is? I have important activities to do.

And sometimes common sense wins. We actually cancel things. We put our livelihood above our constant need for action. Good for us.

I’m not saying we don’t need to be tough and take a stand against the weather. We just need a little common sense.

But it’s not whether we take a stand against the weather that is of question here. It’s our reaction to having to be still that is disturbing. Inactivity is the bane of our existence. We must be distracted from ourselves.

You would think in a world where we constantly put ourselves on the go, in a world where the expectation is that you will always be on the go, we might take advantage of the pass given to us by Mother Nature to just take a breather.

In fact it would be a perfect time with the wind whipping at 45 miles an hour and the temp well below zero, to slow down and reflect. Maybe even reflect for just a moment on the notion that activity is not productivity, that activity is not fulfillment.

Maybe stop and think that maybe your life isn’t fuller because you fill it with activity. Maybe it is actually the opposite.

You need to engage in activities that bring you fulfillment. Then you need to engage in doing nothing so that fulfillment, that contentment can soak in. Give your mind and body time to process and synthesize the experience instead of jumping to the next thing.

It’s like feeding foods into a food processor. If you shove things into it faster than it can process it, the processor will jam or under-perform or malfunction. That puree you were hoping for won’t be very puree like at all if indeed anything comes from it at all.

The Polar Vortex is an opportunity. Listen to Mother Nature. Be still.