Learning to Let the Rain In
Storms rolled in yesterday and oh, it's chilly this morning.
What do they say? March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, so that April showers can bring Mayflowers and Pilgrims.
Storms are sometimes... transformative. Storms bring a difference. Storms harrow us and make change happen.
I'm talking about storms because I don't want to talk about waking up at five in the morning and not being able to focus or sleep for two and a half hours. That could have been from the weather changing, or it could be the thousand things on my mind. I've had problems with storms since I was in my 20s an had a leaking roof that led to some rather severe repairs that needed to be done. In my teens we had a few fun storms at Scout Camp where we had to go dig trenches, haul branches, prepare tents. It feels different to dig trenches shirtless in the dark as hot rain pours down than to be in the middle of brushing your teeth and have a chunk of plaster fall on your head.
We sometimes compliment things by saying they can weather a storm. If you're strong enough, if you have the walls and foundations to survive a situation that seems overwhelming to even somebody on the outside, that feels like you're well put together. Like the Good Book says, if your house is built on the rock instead of on the sand, you're a wise man.
The only challenge I have with that particular proverb is that sometimes we can't tell if it's sand or sandstone. Sometimes the rocks that we think we're building everything on slip away.
You can take this internally. It can be as simple as being somebody who enjoys writing science fantasy stories about warriors in the void battling aliens on planets that teem with powerful ancient technology. All of that is awesome, but if you call your main character a "space marine", Games Workshop's lawyers are gonna come along and cause some trouble.
You can build your foundation on a church. And here in America, that goes really well until something happens with the pastor. Maybe two or three of them in a row. And that doesn't mean your church is wrong. It doesn't mean your faith is wrong. But it's really easy to put those foundations on the individuals, or on the teachings of an individual, rather than on what lies beyond.
What is beyond the individual or the individual person's teaching?
Well, that's something that we're all working to uncover. Both as a society and as people.
That's why book clubs and study groups are so popular. It's why people make friends and stay friends, even if you disagree about favorite media or politics or so many other things. Even if that one "friend" makes you grit your teeth at some point every week at D&D, you balance one another. The tension of your interactions around the gaming table puts you both in a better (hopefully) frame of mind for the next week of work. That is something that I've been working on for myself and trying to explain better for my students for a very long time.
What do you do when you read that book and you just don't get it? Does that mean that you're wrong? What do you do when you listen to that song or speak that poem aloud and you still don't feel the rhythm of it? It doesn't speak to you.
When it goes wrong, you wake up at five a.m. You sit there trying to meditate. Trying to listen to comfort media. Trying to listen to new things. Trying to listen to music. Trying to enjoy the silence, or to pray.
And the tension doesn't always go away.
And part of that, I believe, is that the natural response of trying to understand and control doesn't always work when we're dealing with things that are bigger than us.
This is a lot of where horror or the "new weird" emerge in media. I might not be able to understand the YouTube algorithm, but I can understand being locked in a submarine in a bloody ocean.
I might not be sure if I should focus on this lesson set or that lesson set or this aspect of my personal life, but I can sure clean the kitchen again. And then when you become too fixated on that one thing, cleaning the kitchen for example, well, that's when tensions come up. If other people don't help you clean the kitchen, or if you are cleaning so much that it's getting in the way of your enjoyment or other essential tasks, that's a problem
Storms blow. Storms come in through the cracks. Storms do things that we don't expect. And when we're strong enough to weather a storm, that's a good thing.
The part that I'm working on for myself, and trying to figure out how to explain in my writing and my teaching and my analysis work, is how sometimes weathering a storm means letting a little bit of the rain in. Watching how the water flows around your foundations and undercuts them, so that you know how to repair them for the future.
Life is full of storms and good days. Days that are too hot and too cold. And in such times as these, when we flip so suddenly from pleasant weather to chilly weather, or in my mind flips from contented to awake at five a.m., that's when we can look for the peace. Look for how to let the storm winds blow and how to rebuild without having to lay new foundations every time, or add more layers of concrete and rebar.
What can we change about our environment or our interaction with that environment?
What can we change about our input that might not necessarily improve our output but might help us to feel more content and feel more able to proceed with the everyday?
And in doing that, we weather all the storms and maybe build something that isn't as affected by the weather.