There is an old saying that the best thing to do when it rains…is to let it.
Let it rain. As if we have a choice. We have no choice, but we have a tendency to react as we if do. We resist the rain, complain about it, huddle ourselves up or hurry ourselves up as if either of those things would get us less wet. I’m writing this in the midst of a Harvest season that followed on a Summer of drought. We should not already be resisting the rain. We should still be in that inhaling, welcoming, going out to stand in it mode of being.
I am not. At least, not entirely.
Intellectually I am still welcoming the refilling of the rivers and the streams and the reservoirs and lakes. I am still grateful not to be watering the garden.
Emotionally, it is more of a mixed bag. I am loving the regreening of paddocks and lawns and road verges. I am delighting in the roses and their poetic traditional holding of raindrops. I have not yet got to the point of complaining about the rain, but I am already beginning to resist it to the extent
that I do not want to be out in it, to the extent that it arrives at the “wrong” time to enable me to get out do what I need to do in the garden.
~
I could have walked this morning, while the sun was still shining. I did not. I made the mistake of thinking I would read just one chapter while I finished my coffee. I should know by now that I rarely read just one chapter of anything, so for sure I am not going to read just one chapter of a book that counts as research and which is also a joy of discovery.
Just one more then. And…
...and somewhere along the way I got hungry and it got late enough to justify brunch if not actual lunch. I learned about – no, I didn’t – I read about – I will need to re-read several more times before I can claim to have learned anything – I read about art collecting, about renovating one more old house and how that was different to the previous one, about calligraphy, about the differences in business models between Japan and America, about the differences between Japan and China. I read a lot about what the author has done, and how he thinks and what he values, but surprisingly little about how he actually feels.
Or rather, felt. The book I am reading is 30 years old. I do not know whether the concerns it raises have been addressed, or whether the situation has worsened. Probably the latter. What I am reading and trying to learn are really thoughts for another day. For today, the relevant fact is that I fell into the book, and the weather decided that maybe I wasn’t interested in going outside.
By the time I’d snacked and got my act together to head out into the brilliant sunshine, with a plan to walk into the city by the scenic route, and pick up the few bits on my shopping list…the sky was changing. The wall-to-wall blue was morphing into battleship grey. It came from nowhere, as if birthed by something unseen above, and then it threw down its load.
Sometimes rain starts with drizzle, spitty-spotty warnings of what’s on the way. Sometimes it just up-ends the bucket and dumps the whole lot as quickly as it can manage. This was one of those. The greyness expanding, the rain sudden and insistent. Me inappropriately dressed. I’d gone out wondering about the temperature not about precipitation.
I turned around. I wasn’t far from home. I got there soggy.
I sat and read another chapter. I am reading about a world that was already ending when the book was written. I am reading a romantic history while living a mundane life. There is an obvious connection between the two, but I recognise that I do have an affectionate attachment to my mundanity.
I speak to a friend who is struggling with trying to live his own life, while being the only one to be helping someone who is coming to the end of theirs. I will not pretend to understand the burden – or as he might see it, the privilege – of this trust. I only know that the timing sucks. My friend has his own too recent and more direct loss to deal with. He needs to be with his brothers, see other friends that he has not seen for too long, celebrate his mother’s life, tend to his own soul. But he has on his heart and mind that here is another human being coming to the end of their days and facing up to the fact that they may do so alone.
They may do so alone, because my friend who has done so much, needs to be elsewhere in the days ahead, a week, ten days, a fortnight…which may be too long.
There are others who could step up here, offer to help out. People who know the man in question as I do not. Relatives. Friends. It makes me question in what circumstances I would be willing to step up and when, realistically, not. That’s a question I need to sit with. I have no easy answers. That my answer in this case is ‘no’ is also not an easy one to voice, but I do. It’s even less easy to
live with. I feel myself diminished by the offer I do not make.
I am blunt in my pre-emption. I say that I won’t ask whether there is anything I can do, because I know that there is and that I won't.
He does not tell me that this is ok. He may have hoped I would respond differently.
I wasn’t asked for help, and hand-on-heart I cannot say how I would have responded if I had been. If I had offered without being asked, I am fairly sure it would have be declined, but still I feel guilty for not making the offer. And therefore also for judging others who have also stepped away without doing a fragment of what my friend has done.
This is the real rain of this day. The emotional darkness that I have to let be. The weather that we cannot control is not only what falls from the sky, in floods or drought or wind storms or ice or cold blank silence. It is also what bubbles up inside us.
The actual sky outside my window clears again. Brilliant sunshine lights up my garden. I pull my boots on again, this time with a less ambitious plan of walking to the local shops. Even so, within minutes, less than five, I’m being deluged again. This time out of a clear blue sky. The cloud must be behind me. Rain streams down in front of me, droplets that seem to be flowing down an invisible string so vertical are the rivulets. Like the way they come out of a showerhead. I walk through them, thinking how pretty they look.
I look at the puddles and the shining leaves. Beauty, if I choose to see it that way.
I only manage to buy a few of the things I wanted, but the rest can wait. I want to say that the walk has eased my own heart and mind but it has not. I feel deeply for my friend, and wish I could be a better one. I wish I had the strength that he has.
~ ~ ~
There is a postscript to this. A late evening call, in which he tells me that one of those who could have stepped in, has done so. That he is relieved - the first time that he fully admits how heavy the load was. The sky clears a little. By the time I post this he will be elsewhere, and I will be breathing more easily too. As someone else said, the sun comes out eventually.
