Getting Out from Under

Last night the city of Houston succumbed to the force of Mother Nature with flash flooding that wrought havoc on the physical, emotional, and psychological lives of many. For those who were fortunate enough to weather the storm with little or no consequence, today is more of an inconvenience than a nightmare and maybe, depending on how you look at it, a welcome opportunity/permission slip to take a day off. Regardless of how you’ve been impacted, I invite you to consider the following lyric from a song called “Keep Us” by Peter Bradley Adams:

“There's a lesson in the rain that change will always comelet us ride this wave and then greet the sun…”

Rain, no matter how gentle or hard, brings with it the possibility that things will be temporarily altered (i.e. dry to wet, dirty to clean, full to overflow, and so on). It is one of the many tricks nature plays to remind us that change is inevitable and getting too comfortable with the way things are can, sometimes, wreak more havoc than a riotous storm. Waking up to a city submerged can be unsettling, scary, and, in some cases, devastating. Ironically, so is living inside a body, mind, and spirit ruled by patterns of negative thinking, bad habits, and other ways of being. We become habituated (and, therefore, desensitized) to them out of routine; and they become our homegrown paradigm for making choices. The difference between a storm wiping us out and our choices bringing us down is that the former is out of our control. How we value ourselves, the people we love, and this one life we’ve been given to live, is entirely up to us. Learning how to take care and love ourselves is a tremendous responsibility to shoulder. It’s also a privilege that too many of us fail to recognize before our negligence costs us something we can’t get back. Heed the lesson hidden in the urgency of a nature-made storm: Act now, stay calm, call in support, be brave, ask for what you need, take the risk to help yourself, and, most importantly, remember that you’re not (and never have to be) alone. This is how you ride the wave and - with time, patience, and fortitude – one day, greet the sun.