Spring Is Here, and Life Is Good

This weekend was the warmest weather we've had all year in Madison. Walking through the neighborhood, there were lots of kids playing and people grilling out. I walked pasted someone chatting with her neighbor about vegetarian recipes.

The nice weather persisted this morning. I commute by bike to work every day, and today was the first morning I've worn a short sleeve shirt. My seven-mile commute takes me by a park and golf course, through Dunn's marsh, through one of Madison's poorest neighborhoods, and through one of the most expensive neighborhoods.

I see some of the same people each day. I travel about 15 miles per hour. That's slow enough to say hi to people along the way and to see details I'd miss in a car. But it's fast enough that I pass from one neighborhood to a nature preserve with deer and foxes and into another neighborhood all in six minutes time.

I spent 22 years away from here before moving back in 2004. A lot of that time was in a sprawling subtropical costal area of the US. It's a completely different world in an area with sprawl and few people with roots in the area. People are more cynical and materialistic. Whenever someone told me an idea was to idealistic or naïve, I would offer the cliché that "another world is possible." I took that on faith. I didn't know it for a fact, but I had to accept that human culture could be better. If people could think it up for the settings of utopian science fiction, maybe one day we would build it.

Now I would change the refrain to "another world exists, and you can get here without a passport in a few hours." It's not utopia. But most people live a happy life and try to make the world a better place for the future. They have hope that an even better world is possible.

Everything has thawed, and people are out enjoying it.

There are places where people know their neighborhood,
Where people live there and they think that life is good.
--Dave Rovics