Do you know what they do in Poland when it snows?

"Do you know what they do in Poland when it snows?"

I looked wide-eyed at my grandfather and shook my head from side to side.

"They let it snow."

At my grandmother's tiny kitchen table, where my grandfather and I often sat for hours, there was talk, sometimes of Germany, sometimes of Poland. My grandfather was born in Danzig, immediately qualified in our house as "Freie Stadt": "Free City."

This is not the moment to get into the troubled history of the Baltic port city now known as Gdańsk, or the many tears shed at the kitchen table, whether due to personal neurodynamics, national/cultural proclivity or the objectively to-weep-for history of the twentieth century.

We're just going to let it snow.

To my cheerier friends and colleagues, who believe that everything is for the best, who "move fast and break things," who can't wait to "fail fast," I say: Tread carefully.

Failure leaves footprints in the snow of your heart.