This is a Daily Moment—short perspectives on life and times through a dad’s eye.
On our walk to school this morning, the boys and I came across some frozen puddles in the street. Being from Barcelona, this wasn’t something they’d seen much before, and they really enjoyed tapping their toes on the ice and watching it crack through.
This reminded me of the time I took the Trans-Siberian Express railroad through Mongolia into Eastern Russia to the famous Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake in the world. And in winter, apparently the ice gets so thick that they build a highway over it to cut down on some miles driving around.
Locals also told me about a legend where, if you dip your hands in the lake you live in extra year, dip your feet in and you get 5 years, and if you submerge your whole body you add an extra 10 years to your life. So one afternoon, after some local Russian vodka, I jumped into the ice cold waters in my underwear. And it was freezing.
My kids listened to this absolutely fascinated (I left out the vodka part). And then one of them asked me if it was true that I’d live an extra 10 years. Of course the answer to that is ‘probably not.’ But who really knows? How many years do you have anyway? So with the years that you do have, why not live every one as best you can?
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