Feel the Rain

Transcript

This is how your life is already wonderful.

I’d like to talk about feeling the rain.

You can probably hear a bit of thunder and rain falling on my skylight in the background here.

It’s rainy season in Guadalajara and I think this is the third time this week I have been caught in the rain in some form or another. I bring my rain coat and I bring my umbrella but to be honest it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference.

You have probably heard that quote or seen that meme popularly attributed to Bob Marley or Bob Dylan. Some people feel the rain, others get wet.

What happens when I’m on my way home, it takes about 25 minutes to walk home from the Plaza and what happens?

I guess I could be precious about it, I could try to avoid getting myself wet which would be futile.

The drainage system in this city and in most of Mexico is just abysmal or nonexistent. There’s probably one percent or less street corners that have a drain to let the water flow through and the ones I passed on the way home, the water just rolls right over them as if they aren’t there.

The water is just too deep for the pipe and at points its like I step onto the street and my foot goes down and the water gets about an inch higher than my ankle maybe 3 inches. Even on some foot paths on my way home it is up to my ankle.

You can try to be precious about it and sometimes when it starts the rain you try to jump over that puddle and think “I won’t get my boots wet” or “I won’t get my socks wet”.

There comes a point where you have to face the fact. You are going to get wet.

So there’s a principle in stoic philosophy of “ok I wake up in the morning, what are some of the bad things that might happen to me today? A customer might yell at me or I might get stuck in traffic or it might rain.

I might trip, some minor injury or a clumsy mistake. All these things that kind of happen we know might happen but a lot of times we have the fantasy that they will never happen. Or they don’t happen every day so maybe they won’t happen today and when they do we get so distraught about them because we are trying to have that fantasy, trying to avoid the reality of the fact that sometimes bad things happen.

If we know its gonna rain, we know we are going to get wet then its time to enjoy it. Time to step into the rain, like stepping into a cold shower. Of course if you have it in your mind like “Oh, this is going to be bad, I’m gonna feel the cold and it will be nasty.”

Yes you increase the suffering probably by 50 fold. It can be that intense the difference in the thought. Wheras if you just walk straight into the cold shower without thinking about it nothing happens. You get wet, you get cold. Not a big deal.

So I embraced the fact that I am going to get wet on the way home. People see me walking. They look outside their houses and they see me singing in the rain.

Im walking through the street, every step I take there’s a spray of water comes from my foot. It’s just what’s going to happen. Take another step into the creek that is the street.

It’s just what happens, gonna get wet. Let’s enjoy it. Let’s be in the rain.