The Glass Between Us

On windows, seasons, and the slow forgetting of cold

The branches look like capillaries against the winter sky. I notice this from behind glass, coffee warming my palms, feet in thick socks against wooden floors that were cold an hour ago before the heating kicked in.

Outside, a dusting of snow clings to the hedge, to the rooftops, to the skeletal architecture of the dormant tree.

The red shed holds its color against all that grey and brown and white. Everything out there exists in a state I can see but cannot feel.

90%.

That’s the number researchers give us.

Ninety percent of our Western lives spent inside structures we’ve built to keep out exactly what I’m looking at through this window.

The cold. The damp. The unpredictable moods of the sky.

I grew up in Madrid where summer heat made staying indoors a survival tactic, where we pulled down metal shutters against the three o’clock sun and the city went silent except for the hum of fans and the occasional clatter of dishes in kitchens. But that was seasonal. That was responsive.

Now, in Denmark, I find myself inside regardless of what the weather does.

January or July, the percentage shifts between seasons, only so much.

There’s a word in Spanish, intemperie.

It means exposure to the elements, being out in the open, unprotected. We use it mostly in a negative sense. “A la intemperie” suggests hardship, vulnerability, the absence of shelter. But lately I’ve been turning the word over in my mouth, wondering what we’ve lost by making intemperie something to always avoid.

The tree outside my window knows things I’ve forgotten. It knows what zero degrees feels like against bark. It knows the weight of snow, the particular silence that comes when the world goes white. Its roots are in earth I haven’t touched since autumn, when I planted bulbs that are now sleeping somewhere under that frozen ground.

The tree is living through this winter. I am merely watching it.

My son was born into this indoor life. He knows rain from the sound it makes against windows, wind from the way it moves branches he observes from his chair.

When I take him outside, really outside, into the full texture of weather, he goes quiet with concentration. His small hands reach for things: a stick, wet leaves. He exhales so he can see his breath in the cold air against the street lamps surrounding our house, he breaks down the rough grain of tree bark.

Lately, he just learned to prefer the controlled environment - it is after all, -9°C these days, so I don’t blame him-. But so far, everything out there is still equally interesting, equally worthy of touch.

I think about the architects of this indoor existence. Not individuals, but the slow accumulation of choices that built this world of climate control and sealed windows and the soft hum of ventilation systems.

Central heating arrived in my grandmother’s life like a miracle.

Air conditioning transformed how cities could function, how bodies could avoid discomfort, how we could work through seasons without ever really inhabiting them.

And now here I am, watching winter happen like a film playing on the other side of glass.

The ninety percent includes sleep, of course. Work. The hours we spend in cars moving between buildings. It includes hospitals and schools and supermarkets and all the bright interiors we pass through on our way from one enclosed space to another.

Some of this is necessary.

Some of this has extended our lives, protected the vulnerable, made survival in harsh climates possible. I’m not naive enough to romanticize frostbite or the particular suffering of poverty’s exposure to weather.

But there’s a middle ground we’ve overshot. A comfort we pursued past the point of diminishing returns. The body, evolved for millennia under open sky, now spends most of its hours in artificial light and recycled air. Technology solved the problem of indoor climate so completely that we’ve forgotten it was never only a problem.

Through the window, the light is doing something subtle. The clouds have thinned just enough to let a diffuse glow touch the snow, making it luminesce faintly. It will last maybe ten minutes, this particular quality of light. If I don’t go outside now, I’ll miss it. I’ll have seen it but not felt it, not had it touch my face, not stood in it as a body existing in the same space as the snow and the bare branches and the cold air that makes lungs expand differently.

My coffee is finished. The cup sits empty and cooling in my hands.

I could put on my coat. I could step out, even briefly, into the intemperie. Feel what the tree feels. Let the boundary between inside and outside dissolve for a moment before I inevitably return to warmth and shelter and the gentle imprisonment of modern comfort.

The branches reach upward like something asking.

I put down the cup.

Happy new year everyone.

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