Let It Rain

The storm comes without warning, and it comes from everywhere at once.

Twisting wind and a raging sea. Conflict and chaos. Violent gusts driving thoughts at you from all directions, unyielding — an onslaught of confusing fragments, each one trying to throw you off the cliff, or at least drop you to your knees. And it drops you.

You cannot see your own hand in front of your face.

The noise is so loud your brain starts to scramble. It loses the thread of the simplest things — forgetting, for a moment, how to send the most basic signal to your own lungs. Your breathing goes ragged and then goes missing. Every input at once and none of it usable. You are somewhere past thought now, running on the animal part.

So you claw.

You reach through the dark for something, anything, solid enough to hold. Any handhold that would give you even a moment of stability. You are not asking for the storm to end anymore. You are asking for half a second of reprieve. One breath of quiet. One break in the wind.

It does not come.

The storm does not relent. It has no schedule, and it was never going to keep yours. And so you stay there — mind adrift, lost, certain this is a nightmare with no edge to it, clawing harder the longer the calm refuses to arrive.

The storm is not what is destroying you.

Your demand that it stop is.

Go back and feel it. Every ounce of you reaching for a calm that has not come — that reaching is the panic. That clawing is the drowning. The wind and the dark and the noise are just weather. Loud, violent, real weather, and weather has never once killed a man who stopped fighting it. The unbearable part, the part that has you on your knees, is not the storm. It is the voice inside screaming that this should not be happening, refusing to stand until it stops.

Be still. Stop clawing.

This is not a surrender or submission crowning the storm as victor over you. This is wisdom that reaching was never going to work, and it was spending the last of the footing you had left.

Let it rain. Let the wind come and take what it takes. Stop demanding a calm that is not on offer, and you will find the strange, solid thing underneath the panic — that you can stand in this. Not after it passes. Now, in the middle of it, soaked and battered and breathing again. You were never going to out-claw the storm. You only had to stop fighting the water long enough to feel your own feet under you.

The man who makes his peace with the storm outlasts every man still begging it to end.

The rain was never the enemy.

Your war against it was.

"Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them." — Epictetus