what wind and rain are teaching me about grief and suffering

As Maria and I lingered over breakfast one morning this week I had one of those ‘aha moments’ that offers an instant and substantial paradigm shift. The context was me lamenting (weirdly and perhaps funnily) how favourable circumstances improve my mood. Why lamenting? Because I seek an inner disposition that sees beyond the circumstantial.

I can’t remember when I first came across the sentiment apparently common in Sweden and Norway that in essence says, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” But when I did, it had a striking impact on me, and since then I have been frequently reminded by my wise daughter of a related idea, that “all weather has beauty”, and to describe weather as ‘beautiful’ conflates it with the experience of pleasantness, betraying our civilised and domesticated bias toward comfort and convenience.

A significant expression of my commitment to re-wilding, is swimming in the ocean early every morning: whatever the conditions, same time, same place(s). The discipline of intentional immersion with mindfulness, bodyfulness and spirituality has opened windows of insight I could never have anticipated. One of them has been the genuine appreciation of being vulnerable and exposed in wild weather. (I use the world vulnerable relatively. I do not take undue risks and the promise of coffee and a warm shower is ever-present. But nonetheless, offering my naked skin to the elements of beach and pre-dawn mornings is an act of submission.)

It has taken me a while to embrace the morning conditions, whatever they happen to be, but I can recognise genuine movement from affirmation of the sentiment, to authentic experience. In our post breakfast pondering on the reality of our human experience and the normality of positive and negative emotions in response to circumstances, I was struck by the parallels between my experience of unpleasant weather in the pre-dawn at the ocean’s edge, and the reality of grief and suffering in life.

The logic I am playing with is this:

Domain 1: the outdoors

• Weather just is. It is neither good nor bad. We experience it in a variety of ways, including the activity it invites, the clothing required to appreciate it fully and our mental model that appreciates it for what it is in all its variety.

Domain 2: life

• Life just is. We can strive to insulate ourselves from trauma and uncertainty, but those efforts are illusionary. We can experience life in a variety of ways, and to be a fully conscious human, I do not ‘endure’ or ‘problem solve’ anything that threatens my comfort, convenience or security. Rather I choose to be fully present in it, to embrace the textures and contours of it, recognising the adventure in human consciousness it offers.

I am not advocating for polyana smiles or eeyore grumpiness or any other superficial response that denies the depth of pain life inevitably serves us. My soul is opening up to the reality that life just is. My true self exists independently of my circumstances. Integrity is tapping into that identity and living in alignment with it irrespective of the turbulence of life.

Which is for me not a destination I ever expect to arrive at. It is rather a lens on my living that invites me on a pilgrim’s journey of spiralling integrity. I never expected to experience exhilarated peace in the wind and rain as I dip in the dark turbulent ocean in winter. But I do. So perhaps becoming fully alive in the middle of turbulent life circumstances is not such a pipe dream after all.

If you’ve been following my posts this year, you’ll know that there is more uncertainty in our lives this year than we’ve ever experienced. Major upheaval in our housing, our income and our health. In the midst of all the unknowns, our natural inclination has been to problem solve, to endure, to resolve. To wait, and wait some more, until things become clearer and we can get on with the next phase. But as I posted recently, we are playing practically and spiritually with the possibility that not knowing the path, is the path.

Maybe inconvenience and discomfort, maybe pain and suffering, maybe grief and disappointment are not aberrations to be resisted but the texture of life to be felt in my mind, body and soul. Maybe the wind and rain offer me intelligence that the sun in all its positive energy cannot.

I have long held a theory, (really just a dinner party opinion) that the depth of cultural innovation and expression in a city is directly correlated with the unpleasantness of the weather. Think Seattle, St Petersburg, Berlin, Edinburgh, for example. Brisbane, Las Angeles and Barcelona are fabulous cities, but hardly hotbeds of cultural and artistic innovation. It appears there is something about the relationship between unpleasant weather and cultural creativity. Similarly, maybe there is something about the relationship between ‘unpleasant’ circumstances and spiritual intelligence.