In case you haven’t noticed, South Carolina is having an unusually warm winter. It’s commonplace to see people walking around in shorts. Even when it gets cold, some students still persist in wearing shorts, even if they layer up on their upper half.
Many of my friends wear shorts even through the cold months. It’s not something I would do personally, but also not something I judge them for. However, I think the trend toward wearing shorts in defiance of winter, especially (in my experience) among college-age males, is indicative of negative patterns of thought in our society. I don’t want you to read this article as an attack on the actual behavior of wearing shorts in cold weather but rather as an analysis of what potentially underlies this odd behavior.
Guys writing online about why they wear shorts all the time and the friends I’ve asked about it say that for them, wearing shorts all the time is about comfort. They just find shorts more comfortable than pants. That might be true in general (although I don’t necessarily agree), but you can’t really deny that shorts are less comfortable for walking around in the cold than pants. The response I’ve heard to this objection is that modern young people don’t have to spend much time outside anymore. Even if it’s cold outside, we can just hop out of our cars and hotfoot it the short distance to the climate-controlled building where we work or study.
Some people might see this as evidence of human progress, but I would encourage us to rethink this. While people are more than purely biochemical organisms inhabiting a physical universe, we are still subject to nature. In so many areas of our existence, humans have dominated nature and bent it to their will. We have made great efforts to conform external reality to our desires, rather than conforming ourselves to external reality. I’m not saying this is always bad or suggesting we give up modern amenities like air conditioning, but we should accept that there are limits to what we can change about the world we live in.
By dressing like it’s always summer, we ignore the unique variations in weather each day as well as the timeless beauty of the seasons, which British academic and author C.S. Lewis claims satisfy the human desire for change while simultaneously meeting our longing for permanence. Lewis writes in “The Screwtape Letters:” “He (God) gives them (humans) the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence an immemorial theme.” You probably have a favorite season — I know I do — but would you really want to have that season year-round?
The seasons’ cycle of life, death and rebirth is something we should take pleasure in, not ignore or rush through on our way to climate-controlled buildings. I admit, winter generally isn’t as pleasant as spring and for many people, pants aren’t as pleasant to wear as shorts. But it’s only out of comparison with the one that can truly appreciate the other.
The trend of wearing warm-weather clothes in defiance of the actual temperatures seems to me to be implicitly saying either that there is nothing worthwhile in spending time outside in nature, or that people shouldn’t spend time outside until the temperature is in accordance with what they’ve been wearing all along. But wearing pants when it’s cold outside or otherwise dressing according to the weather is a step in the right direction of respecting and enjoying nature.
To break out of the mindset that the natural world is something to be hurried through as quickly as possible or bent to our wills, let’s give pants a chance.