People who see the spring construction season as a bad time of the year should come to Lac La Biche this week and take a joyful walk on the temporary sidewalks laid out during the ongoing Main Street construction process.
Spring and Construction.
Two words that don’t always work in tandem to produce smiles … but what if Spring becomes a verb? Well, for any pedestrian — perhaps better for those over 200 lbs — who choose to go for a walk through the Lac La Biche downtown core these days, I guarantee the plywood footpaths will make you smile (the local businesses would probably be happy to see a few more visitors too).
Carrying some weekend pressure, I thought I go for a little stroll downtown on Saturday night and see what the construction zone looked like up close. There's fences and machinery, broken concrete and dirt on the surface— and underneath it all, likely a few layers of frustration from businesspeople, community members and visitors who are trying to make their way and make a living in Lac La Biche.
But just three steps down the sidewalk, the negatives started to bounce free. I was smiling, at first inside, because I thought I shouldn't be happy walking in a place with such disruptive effects … but then the smile kind of came outside as I bounced. Yep – bounced with the playful response under-foot from each step. It seemed like gravity’s pull was being turned down slightly.
The expressions ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ and ‘life is what you make it,’ could be combined in our construction zone.
Come for a bounce — maybe it'll change your mind about other things or perhaps — and this might just be the lasting effects of a few jiggles to my brain — it’s the start of something new — maybe instead of war zones we should install trampolines, perhaps every parliament in the world should be outfitted with bouncy rooms.
Silly? Yes. Absolutely. Obviously springy sheets of one-inch plywood aren’t going to solve global upheavals, but they solved mine for a couple of minutes.
Perhaps identifying a little fun, a little bright spot, is just enough to make the best of the world around us, to smell the roses, as they say… or feel the plywood in this case. Whatever we can do to smile, it should be pursued. So, put a little bounce in your step, a little spring in your stride.
And if you can’t do it metaphorically, come to Lac La Biche while the temporary sidewalks are still here, and do it actually.