Rainy days change viewpoints

Jennah Rose English-Welch

I hate rain. I have always hated rain. It’s nasty. It’s cold. It’s wet. And it always seems to happen when I am supposed to be dressed up. Rain makes me a very bitter person. I’m normally exploding with the happiness and optimism of a wide-eyed, sugar-possessed kindergartner. But two seconds of rain turns me into the crabby old cat lady next door.

So needless to say, the torrential rainstorms that have ruined the majority of September – and now October - were not favorably accepted in my person. Or at least they weren’t at first.

After day 6,416 of rain (okay, maybe I am exaggerating slightly) I was sitting outside Ornelas Hall in the “smircle” (smoking circle) with my trusty pen and notebook. It was early afternoon and looked like nightfall. The wind was biting, dropping the temperature down to 12 degrees (okay, maybe I am exaggerating again). I was brooding, mourning, pining for a summer lost and a sunshine gone.

Then the bell tower chimed the hour, its counting call wafting over the campus. After the time count, it began to sing, the familiar chords of “You Are My Sunshine” dancing through the air in spite of the rain.

At first, I thought about being angry. Seriously? I thought. What, are we pouring salt on my wounds? Kicking me when I am down? Then I stopped and was struck by the innocent sweetness of the tune: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know, Dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

On the tune played, three more times, and I felt a sort of glow thinking of the song’s simplicity. I felt I should be in an elementary classroom and not on a college campus. It was about that time I heard the ducks on Harvey Lake giddy - not in spite of - but because of the rain.

Then I saw the rain, lace and glitter falling from an open sky, and I was blown away by its breathtaking beauty.

I do this often. In spite of my oft-annoying optimism, I am prone to self-inflicted melancholy. It often doesn’t occur to me that happiness is not necessarily an emotion, it’s a characteristic as well, and it’s a self-inflicted characteristic at that. It’s often perspective-oriented as well.

The rain made me angry until I changed my perspective and looked beyond both it and myself. Goodness knows if I had been a duck, I would have been in hog, er, duck heaven. My happiness that afternoon was contingent on my perspective. When I changed my perspective, my level of happiness changed.

Isn’t that just like life? It’s not about the circumstance. It’s about the perspective. We get caught up in a 2-D life, stuck in a perspective of work, school, friends, family. Most of the time this works and mostly out of necessity. But every now and then we crash. We feel like we are missing out on something.

For me, I was missing out on the sun, but when I have my sun, the ducks have not their rain. So was it a good day, or was it a bad day? I guess it depends on whether you are the one hiding under the smircle, the duck, or the rain itself.

Here’s to being “quacky.”