Weather and Life

As I am finally back to walking more and can almost always make the morning trek up to the village for coffee, I also have time to reflect upon the great and the small.

This morning it struck me how similar the weather and life are: I set off in fog so thick that not only were the mountains and the lake missing, but also the row of trees not 300 yards from the sidewalk that I take. No rain though as that had been in the night.

Archive picture - today you couldn't see the trees!

Upon my return, I amused myself taking pictures of the raindrops adorning leaves, branches and plants – fog lifting.

By noon it was one of those beautiful days, warm in the sun and one could almost imagine summer.

By four in the afternoon clouds were appearing here and there, for the most beautiful cumulus.

Some gray in various points of the compass, but by six p.m. again only sunny skies could be seen from out my window. Then as evening drew night, the clouds came back, but with silver linings.

So it is with life: although we perhaps notice the “gray” days more, every life has plenty of everything – unless one is on the extreme scale of awfulness or the other extreme of nothing-ever-bad-happens. For most of us however, life varies with us sometimes being totally surrounded by the fog – incapable of seeing what could be beyond for better or worse. At other times, we are entirely in the sun – beautiful events such as weddings, the birth of a child, a birthday – have us thinking that this is the best of life.

Neither, or both, is the only reality: we only notice the sun thanks to the rain, the gray days thanks to the brighter ones. I would even dare to advance that “life-on-an-even-keel” could be mighty boring.  How else to know the highs if one has nothing against which to measure them? How else to have hope when things are seemingly, endlessly awful?
 

Then there is the mix in between, the mundane, the I-haven't-been-paying-attention to how fabulous life really is. These too count and contribute to the mixture that adds contrast both in weather and in life.

So I’ll take it all, the good, the bad and the indifferent: each is necessary in its own right. And there is beauty in the shadow and the light.

an orchid in sunlight shows the shadow of the overlapping petals