There's a certain aesthetic pleasure to a rainy day: lying stretched out on a couch under a worn blanket, clean from the shower, a mug of steaming tea by your right elbow, a book in your hand. Many of us don't have time to allow our selves this simplicity, this relaxation in the divides between couch cushions, the pages of a book illuminated by gray cloudy light, the enjoyment of the ambient sound of rain pushed by wind. And so we hate rainy days, they are a nuisance, puddles in the bottoms of our sneakers, soggy papers crumpled inside saturated bags, frizzy hair caught between a decision to flatten or stand on end around our ears. We think of fogged windshields and automobile accidents that we don't even register the significance of because we are late, late, late!
Rain slows us down to an unbearable pace when we are used to hurtling through our lives at light speed, desperate to reach a finish line obscured from sight by our uncertainty and cluelessness about the nature of what we are even chasing. We hate rainy days because we must notice the slowness of the journey, the intensity of the elements that surround us and the silliness of our misguided perception of control. In the rain we must reevaluate timelines because the rain will do its best to thwart our chaotic, careening, movement toward the deadlines that hold us, straitjacketed, in time.
Water falls to the ground, tugged by gravity, it is pulled into tidal patterns by our moon, and it collects in rivers that cut through rock at impossibly slow rates, yet still, unstoppable. Water is not caught up in time but it gets where it's going. A moment to wander free from your mind is not a crime, one of those dissociating moments where your eyes glaze over and the green trees blend like paint splotches into the white, watery sky and all you can hear is the thrum of rain droplets on the darkening concrete, and for an instance, you are not you anymore. Instead, you are lulled into the energy of the atmosphere by the love song of the sky, cocooned on your couch in the warmth of your blanket but also suspended in the atmosphere of clouds and condensation, feeling the droplets fall upon your cheek and lose their form, splitting open into a splash that drips down into your eyes, your nose.
If you allow yourself this moment, you will see that we all return to our understanding of time and work and pressure within a few seconds, so to allow ourselves a moment free is a pure, unrefined, yet glorious kindness.
