Three Snowfalls: A Lesson from Nature

Three Snowfalls -A Lesson from Nature A. Ray Olpin My missionary labors have taken me to Hokkaido, the large northern island of the Japanese archipelago. Winter has set in. Outside it is bleak and cold. Snow has been trying to pile up, as it has done in former years. Recently, I mused as I sat by a warm fire, gazing out at Nature's attempts to accumulate an abundance of the pure, white precipitation. Off and on for days, tiny flakes had come lazily fluttering downward from a hazy and indifferent overhead. So sparse and minute were they, and so hesitatingly did they descend, that they counted for nothing. Like little flickering lights they barely bumped on the earth and went out. Then came a sudden change. Infuriated gusts swept down from the polar regions, heedlessly hurling the descending snow- flakes into out-of-the-way nooks or piling them on the dark, damp side of some opposing object, leaving them there prob- ably to melt before the next drift came. And although this blustering, boreal action continued for a couple of days, the ground was not completely covered with snow. Finally, the wind ceased. The black, drifting clouds united, and a heavy and steady precipitation ensued. There was neither hesitancy nor blustering in this third snowfall. Deter- mination was back of every particle. In a few brief hours sev- eral inches of snow had accumulated, everywhere the depth being the same. As I sat looking out on the uniform layer of snow, a para- graph by that influential British writer and moralist, Samuel Smiles, which I had recently read, came vividly to my mind, and immediately I recognized a lesson in what I had seen — an- other valuable lesson from that venerable, old teacher, Nature. I quote the passage from Smiles that I might the better pass on the lesson of the three snowfalls: The several acts may seem in themselves trivial; but so are the contin- uous acts of daily life. Like snowflakes they fall unperceived ; each flake added to the pile produces no perceptible change, and yet the accumulation of snowflakes makes the avalanche. So do repeated acts, one following an- other, at length become consolidated into habit, determining the action of the human being for good or for evil, and, in a word, form the character." (Character, p. 40.) Each of the three snowfalls suggests a mood and a method in human beings. Each snowflake represents one of the acts that "become consolidated in habit" and "form the character." He who would aspire to true greatness, let him remember how the snow accumulates. Sapporo, Japan