Day of Domain, 32nd of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Philosophy can't keep you warm in winter. You can't skin it and wear it, you can't burn it, you can't sit beside it and feel the warmth emanate off of it. It's truly worthless in the cold. 

But still, it does put things in perspective. The weather's never hot nor cold; hot or cold is our experience of different temperature ranges. Given time, we can acclimate to different temperatures - last night's official (NWS) low of 19° F might seem downright balmy to an Inuit or an Antarctic explorer. I've seen people sweat and complain when the temperature gets up into the 80s, although here in Georgia anything below 90 is considered "mild."

I like temperatures in the 90s. I'm comfortable in the 90s. I wasn't comfortable last night. 

It's perfectly acceptable but not quite correct to say, "it's cold outside." People understand what you're saying, which is the whole point of communication, but what is that "it?" "It's" not cold - you're cold. We can say "a cold air mass" has moved into the region, but it that air mass is only cold relative to the temperature of other air masses and our 98.6° bodies. A 19° air mass is incredibly warm relative to the unimaginably cold zero-degree Kelvin temperature of interstellar space. In fact, there's virtually no difference between a 19° F air mass and a 91° F air mass compared to the 0° K cold of outer space. 

Those thoughts didn't make me feel any warmer last night.

My furnace has been running virtually non-stop for some 36 hours now, and the thermostat still hasn't caught up to the setting. The temperature in the house never dropped below 70 last night, at least while I was awake, but there was a chill in the air that felt far below 70°. To prevent the pipes from freezing, I let every faucet in the house drip overnight, and they're still dripping now. I started the car today and the battery didn't want to turn over, although with some coaxing I finally got it to start, and I let the car idle for a half hour to warm the engine and charge the battery.

No, there's no "hot" or "cold" other than our own response and disposition toward the temperature, but there's also no escape from the sensations of "hot" and "cold." "Hot" and "cold" is just the universe being the universe and our experience of "hot" and "cold" is just us being ourselves. 

That thought still didn't make me feel any warmer last night, and it wasn't supposed to.  But it did help me understand that what I was shivering through was just my reaction to things as they are, and instead of fruitlessly wishing things were different perhaps I should just observe them and myself, put an extra blanket on the bed, make sure my cat Eliot was comfortable, and wait for the sensation to pass. 

Zen and Stoicism agree that suffering exists and also that it's mainly self-imposed. Zen's solution is a sort of annihilation of the ego-self through the practice of meditation; Stoicism's solution is through application of logic. My approach is contemplative stoicism, a bit of both.

Update: At 4:04 pm, the outdoor temperature reached 35°, my indoor thermostat finally caught up to its setting, and the furnace finally got like a five-minute break.