What If Everything Is Actually Weather?: Everyday Magic, Day 1,040

I live in a part of the country where we talk a lot about weather a lot because it's both highly entertaining and can kill us. Like many places in the middle of the continent, we're famous for four seasons in one day.

So often, I find myself wishing for the humidity to break, the rain to fall, the rain to stop, the cold snap to snap away, or whatever else that would bring me creature comforts. But we often just get a handful of days each year of pure pleasantness. Mostly it's too much, too little, too icy, too humid, too hot, too cold.

Which set me to thinking about how my child-mind, too wistful about wanting the temperature and temperment of the weather to be just so, is also the man behind the curtain in how I see everything.

I've been clinging to some big velcro illusions about how life is supposed to be the equivalent of a 70-degree day with rainbows, clear skies, and a light breeze.

I'm not alone in often telling myself, "Yup, it's bad, hard or crazy now, but soon, it'll be better," just like this meme here about adulthood. There's something very human about aiming my and maybe your thinking in this direction. In fact, says Pema Chodron----a Tibetan Buddhist nun, marvelous writer and teacher I follow---that propensity to want it all just the way we want it is related to ego. She explains:

Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your own way. You'd just like to have a little peace, you'd like to have a little happiness, you know, just gimme a break. ~ Pema Chodron

But you know what? We're rarely in that perfect room, and even if we could live that way, who would want to? It's not a place where we can open our hearts, expand our minds, or be awed by the great flow, flood, drought, delay, and swish of life coming as it comes, full-tilt made out of what's in the moment, right at us.

Besides, no matter how much any of us try to control our environment to be weather-friendly, weather is inherently wild. Our bodies will, as long as we're on this side of the grave, fall apart. The people we love will suffer or die. The things we like to do and the ways we define ourselves will fall away or change before our very eyes.

Why is this woman smiling? Because the anesthesia hasn't worn off. Also because her husband drew her a substitute eye

Speaking of eyes, here's Exhibit A from this week: I had my second cataract surgery on my magic eye, the one that harbored a cancerous tumor and went on to reject holding steady the lens from my first cataract surgery. "No pain, maybe just a little pressure," they all said, "they" being the doctor, nurses, technicians, and the take-home instruction sheet.

By the time the anesthesia wore off, this wasn't my experience. My eye burned mightily under thick layers of tape holding a plastic cup over my itchy, hurting eye. The pain intensified overnight until I gave up at 3 a.m., wondering if something was wrong with me or my eye. I dialed the doctor on call, who said, "Oh, yeah, that can happen sometimes."

While the pain dissipated over the next 24 hours, I've been thinking about what the doctor said. Everything can happen sometimes: chronic illness diagnoses, marriages breaking up, estranged children or siblings or parents, businesses or organizations going down the drain, addicts of all kind falling off the proverbial wagon, money or benefits running out, even destructive weather upending homes and lives. Some of these and so many more tragedies are born of violence, whether individual or institutionalized, environmentally-catalyzed cancers and otherwise preventable illnesses and outcomes. Let us not ever accept these as normal (and there's a lot to say here about climate-changed weather rolling through our lives too).

One of Stephen Locke's astonishing photos of weather, also featured in our book, Chasing Weather

Those moments between the anything-can-happen? They're called grace, but it's not the only or most common form of grace. That's because hard-weather moments bring their own kind of grace. I think of some of the most tender and beautiful moments I've lived, and they sometimes happened in hospital rooms or while in a helluva lot of pain, and mostly when others were present.

The moment my father died, I was holding his knee, feeling his pulse until it slowly ebbed to nothing. That he waited in a coma for days until I, delayed by my own cancer journey at the time, could get there, is a grace still unfurling.

After my stepfather died, Ken and I and the kids were stuck in traffic for hours as we navigated from flying into the D.C. area to my mom's house in New Jersey, and that after racing back from Colorado, where we were at Ken's cousin's funeral. By the time we arrived at my mom's, we were slap-happy and, contrary to all expectations, I felt flooded with love.

I've laughed and cried with friends over edemame and spring rolls as they shared the treatment protocol ahead of them. I've hugged people I love who are in such pain because of an injustice turning their lives upside down. I've made chicken soup for people who were hurting in ways nothing could fix. And in all of these moments, grace also showed up, often with a surprising sense of humor. It's just like when it's crazy hot with climbing humidity and no cold front on the horizon, or when it's the polar (emphasis on "polar") opposite.

Although I love what Pema Chodron says about us being the sky, maybe the sky is the sky, just like life is life. Maybe we are just the weather too. The more I understand that it's always something and rarely predictable how it will unfold, the more I can embrace the inherently wildness of life.

So let's meet there as well as in the grace notes. You bring the cookies, I'll bring the soup.