THE WICKED WITCH OF WINTER

Invincibility comes in all different shapes, sizes and names. My brother feels invincible right after winning a racquetball game...my sister-in-law right after serving another master meal...my nephews right after making the big score or kiss. Personally, I feel invincible right after nine hours of good sleep. But the message here is all the same...!

There will always be times in our lives -- and in the lives of our leaders -- when the surge of invincibility charges through us. A good and efficacious feeling, but one to be carefully understood before it blinds and consumes us. This is why, for example, triumphant returning Roman Generals always had a slave inside their chariot repeating: "Remember Caesar thou are only a man!" I would presume it's something like what the wives of presidents and prime ministers whisper in their beds at night.

Right now we have a dramatic example playing out before our Chicagoland eyes each new day. The slow yet irrepressible way in which Winter's death-grip on our lives is reluctantly yielding. Yielding to every additional daylight minute, to every additional ray of sun, and to every additional nudge from an insistent green Spring just beneath the white Winter.

The Wicked Witch of Winter is dying.....

When Winter is at its most invincible, we poor mortals wither before its furies. Plunging temperatures and bitter winds can subdue the mightiest of us. Lets admit it -- n any contest between our invincibility and nature's, nature usually still wins. And yet, there are the ineluctable laws of the planets against which even nature itself must bow.

So here's what I'm thinking over my breakfast coffee looking outside at melting Chicago Winter. In January and February you were master of all you surveyed; now with March, you've once again met your match. We call it Spring, and we yearn for its return.

As it does, we are reminded once again that nothing -- neither the seasons, nor the triumphs, nor the tragedies -- last forever. It all passes. What we have to do is wisely wait it out, pick up the results, and go on from there...