The Inbetweens

Its been raining for too long now. On and off since Thursday I think. Why do I care about the weather? You’re right, of course. There isn’t anything I can do about it. I have no control over the decisions the weather makes. I have no way of altering the weather’s choices once they’re made. The weather is entirely intractable.

But that’s all anyone really talks about when it rains—how much they want the rain to stop, for everything to dry off and the gray days and washed out nights to go away. They feel like they’re only chance at happiness is sunshine without clouds. It isn’t that the argument is a bad one. After five days of this I want the rain to be over too.

I guess rain is just a fact of life. But unlike death with its stages of acceptance or taxes with its inevitability the rain never feels settled as a part of our lives. We never wake up one day to drizzle and say to ourselves: “Oh, it’s raining. Well it’ll stop eventually, and until then I’ll just go on.” We say stuff like “Its been raining for too long now.”

Maybe there should be a lesson in this. Maybe there should be a moral to my story. Something like without rain the sun doesn’t mean as much. Or the rain has a certain beauty too. Or that rain is how the plants grow stronger and the earth washes clean. Maybe that would be reductive and useless.

A lesson won’t help. Me telling you that you should learn to accept the rain will accomplish a grand total of nothing. The next time the sky open the both of us will glare at the clouds, hunch our shoulders and wait it out, unhappy about things that are beyond our control.

Sorry if that’s not the sort of thing that you wanted to reflect on. Sorry if you could care less about the rain. I guess I’ve just been having all these meaningless conversations with strangers lately. They all talked about the weather. They all complain about the rain. We all do. We all talk about the weather with strangers. Don’t worry though, the rain will stop soon enough and then we’ll start to grumble about the summer heat.

Sorry if this was a strange post. I’ve been in this bad mood lately and its been raining for too long now.