Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: Rain

  • Gray Skies Are Worthy Too

    Yesterday life felt amazing.

    The sun came out. By afternoon we were on our friend’s boat on Lake Sammamish with amazing blue skies overhead and Mt. Rainier peaking over the trees in the distance, and although I’m not a fan of boating I just felt on top of the world in that moment. In fact, every time the blue skies come out in Seattle I just feel so amazing inside, and I feel like anything is possible and I appreciate life soooooo much.

    But the gray days are worthy too.

    I think I was 20 when I started to realize I may have SAD. After an amazing Spring and Summer and Autumn (when it was still 80 degrees in October) where I just felt so happy and alive every day, when the gray skies returned that December and January suddenly I felt so heavy inside. I thought maybe I was homesick (what with being in a small town college hours away from my big city home) and maybe a little lonely (what with most of my friends being back home), and this belief was solidified when my spirits improved immensely as I met more and more friends the second half of the school year and we experienced a warm and sunny spring. Then I came home from school for the summer, and Seattle just had the most amazing weather (like most summers in Seattle), and I was in the best spirits from February all the way through into September that year.

    Then the clouds returned. Starting in September, it was a very very rainy year ahead, including record rainfall and generational flooding, and suddenly I felt so very heavy again. Exhausted. I thought maybe I missed my summer job back home, or the friends who’d transferred away between my first and second year away at college, or maybe was suffering a little from my mom’s challenging times she was going through at the time. During that time, I started to withdraw: I exercised a lot, studied even more, and stopped going out as much. I didn’t realize just how much it was the clouds/gray weighing on my spirit.

    I’m in my 50s now. I can look at the repeated patterns over the years that I didn’t have the luxury of doing when I was in my early 20s. And every single year I suffer when the weather turns gray. On the outside I seem fine. But on the inside I start feeling heavy. Listless. A little trapped. And then the blue skies return and suddenly I feel like anything is possible again, that everything is just great again.

    So yesterday on our friend’s boat, when the sky was so blue and I just felt so amazingly at peace sitting there with my friends, I realized that I need to work on improving my inner spirits (key word: inner, on the outside I seem totally fine 🙂 ) when the weather turns gray. Because the weather is gray soooooooo much in Seattle, at least half the year, which means I’m essentially giving up half my time (life) to struggling inside when the weather turns gray.

    Thankfully I’m a fighter. When the chips are low I’ve always been able to persevere. And I’m determined to enjoy the other half of my life too, the one where the skies turn gray. I will persevere. The second half of my life will be sunny times in my soul even when the skies turn gray 🙂 Because every single day of life is worthy, even the cloudy gray days too.

  • A Walk In The Rain

    This morning during my early morning walk it rained.

    Typically a Seattle rain is a drizzle, but today it was actual rain, a rain that I wasn’t actually expecting (for some reason I forgot it was supposed to rain this morning) and by the end of my 35 minute tour of the neighborhood I was drenched. My jacket was wet, my sweats were wet and my shoes were drenched enough that my socks were also wet.

    In a perfect world, I would have changed clothes and had a warm cup of coffee. But I arrived home just in time to drive my daughter to class, so rather than changing into dry clothes I hopped into the car with my drenching wet clothes to battle traffic for an hour.

    It was fine. I was fine. I eventually dried and am at no risk of dying from pneumonia or anything, but it was unpleasant driving in my wet shoes and socks, especially since I kept thinking how nasty my feet were going to be by the time I got home in an hour especially since I’m a week overdue for my pedicure 🙂 (note: I get a pedicure Thursday, thank goodness).

    I grew up in Seattle. Which means I went to school in Seattle. Which means I walked many many days to school in the rain, especially in grade school, since in the 1970s and 1980s kids still walked to school and NO kid back then wore rainproof clothes unless they wanted to be teased (no Seattleite wore rain gear back then. Why? I don’t know. A misguided badge of honor, maybe).

    Most rainy days in Seattle are mostly damp days, wherein it’s not dry but it’s not really rainy either. But I do remember some of the soaking rainstorms that accompanied me to school as a kid, and I do remember quite a few days arriving at grade school pretty drenched. We didn’t think too much about it I think, but now I’m realizing how unpleasant it must have been to sit in school all morning with soaking wet clothes. How does someone learn their multiplication tables and how to diagram a sentence when their clothes are wet?

    Then, after school, we often played in the rain. I remember the countless days of playing basketball where there was a puddle just underneath the hoop, and we knew to watch our dribble around that puddle since the puddle more-or-less served as an extra defender. Then, after we were done playing and soaked to the bone, we went home. And no one I knew changed their clothes when we got home — we just let them air dry as we continued on with our evening

    I think of all the distractions we had in school back then. There wasn’t really snacking back then so I remember my stomach growling in that final hour before lunch. I think of the 60 minute oneway bus rides that commenced at 6:45am because I was part of the district’s busing program during high school. How sleepy I was so often throughout the day at school after my 5am wake-up time. And I think of all the days I sat in class with soaking wet clothes and feet. How in the heck was I able to concentrate through all that?

    I’m grateful we live in a different world now. A world where I don’t think kids have to walk to school in the rain, and sit in the classroom with soaking wet clothes. A world where when we get wet, or when our kids get wet, we change into dry clothes. And I’m grateful I have a life in which a big deal is wet clothes or a long bus ride — there are people in this world who’d give anything to have a life where these are considered problems at all. I’m grateful to live in a world where my problems are first world problems.