The Weather

Nature does not care about you.

Not against you. Not for you. Indifferent.

Pain and pleasure arrive on the same impartial schedule. Death and life. Fame and obscurity. They fall on the good man and the bad man alike, in no particular order, for no particular reason — the way rain falls on a field without checking who owns it.

Most people will take it personally. They read their suffering as a verdict and their good fortune as a reward. It is neither. It is weather.

Most men take it personally. They read their suffering as a verdict and their good fortune as a reward. It is neither. It is weather.

The rain that ruins one man’s harvest waters another’s. The same sun that warms you burns someone else. Nature is not running a court. It is running a cycle, and the cycle does not know your name.

The universe is not cruel. Cruelty would require it to be paying attention.

This is the oldest error there is. To chase pleasure, fame, and ease as if they were good — to flee pain, obscurity, and loss as if they were evil — is to assign moral weight to things that carry none. They do not make you better. They do not make you worse. They just happen.

Here is what the indifference leaves you.

If nature is not keeping score, then the only score that exists is the one you keep on yourself. Your character is not weather. Your conduct is not impartially distributed. You build it. It is the one thing in your life that does not happen to you — the one thing that is actually yours.

So stop arguing with the sky.

Stop reading the rain as a message. Stop waiting for conditions to prove you are favored. Take what comes, the good and the bad, with the same steady face — and pour everything you have into the only thing the universe left in your hands.

Yourself.

“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.” — Epictetus