The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever

Yesterday, appropriately enough for the last day of November, I was looking out the window and hearing Pooh's hum that starts:
"Oh the wind is lashing lustily
And the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily"
And then today, on the first of December, I woke up to snow. It started out as flurries, but right now it's coming down rapidly enough to make me hear the the Hogwarts Christmas music from the first movie.

The autumn of my underemployment is over; both the places I've worked since Walker was born were on the quarter system, and that means everything was finished by the end of November and we had a month before the next quarter began on the Monday after New Year's. So what would I have had at this point that I don't already have, besides the money? Fifty people who had read and discussed some of the books I think they ought to. More miles on me and the car. It would have been more of the last twelve years, never a culmination but just another beginning.

The first-of-the-season snowflakes falling outside the window are reminding me of the speaker in this poem by Archibald MacLeish, who is thinking about the mark he wants to make on the world:

The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever

Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after generation
Turn with reverence to the page?

Birdseye scholar of the frozen fish,
What would he make of the sole, clean, clear
Leap of the salmon that has disappeared?

To be, yes!--whether they like it or not!
But not to last when leap and water are forgotten,
A plank of standard pinkness in the dish.

They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river.

No one gets reverence in his lifetime--at best, if he's devoted and also unbearably smug, he gets a show of it. But whether something lasts is always the measure of whether it deserves reverence, and there's no sense living only for the promise of eventual greatness. If there's one thing time off from my usual work has shown me, it's that the flurry of little efforts I usually put off when I'm busy can produce results almost as much as the bigger projects that usually have priority. Some snowflakes "swerve and vanish in the river" while others accumulate.

Are you making little efforts today that might eventually add up to something?