Perhaps like most people, I grew up loving the sun and grumbling about the rain, not-so-secretly wishing that the summers would last forever. It never crossed my mind to question this assumption, maybe because the clear sky meant running and jumping in outdoor play as a child, although I do recall a few youthful antics sliding around in a muddy downpour. The sun came to mean limitless possibility, the rain often a harshly negative reality, and these views solidified and strengthened into adulthood.
Relatively recently, I listened closely to a friend who held firm to the opposite view: they found comfort and security in the rain, a nurturing cleansing and watering of life. To them, the sun was necessary, but it also wielded an impersonal scorching energy that pried them open, leaving them bare and vulnerable to a hostile world.
Despite a sincere effort to understand, I could barely intellectualize this point of view and seemed hopeless in ever gaining anything other than a mild depression at even the thought of a cloudy or rainy day. But I kept trying, pretty much every time it rained, attempting to appreciate the dark weather on some deeper level. I am only just beginning to experience a glimmer of comprehension over a year later.
Life metaphors of the contrast of good and bad, darkness and light, and the need to “appreciate” one for the other run rampant through the logical mind, but I felt something entirely different. I started to see, hear, feel, touch and taste the rain from my heart, asking my brain to take a break in trying to figure out consciously why I defined myself as someone who “didn’t like the rain.” On misty dog walks, I began to see parts of nature that had shot right by me during sunny afternoons when vision overwhelmed the other senses to inconsequence.
While the sun had me focusing on an obscure infinite horizon, the rain put me just a single step from the life in front of me. The sunny vista evoked imagery of “someday,” whereas a rainy overcast focused all the senses in the here and now, an often scarier picture that few I know care to acknowledge. While the sun spoke to future possibility, hope, and past out-of-touch memories, like regret, the rain gently nudged the senses inward toward contemplation of the now, the only place action has meaning.
Getting in touch with life’s rainy days nurtures and cleans, calming distant superficial and materialistic dreams while satiating a natural thirst to simply be. It might be valuable paying attention to those with the most divergent views from your own to best experience the life that surrounds us all.