“CRAAAAACK!” It sounded like the heavens rent as the clouds vomited their payload in a violent deluge. Everyone sitting under the shed seemed to draw their limbs closer to themselves as the landscape suddenly became a waterscape.
I closed my eyes, to tune into the sound and the feel of the misty gusts on my skin. I love the sound of rain on galvanized roofing. It reminds me of stormy childhood nights cosy in my double-decker, up close to the roof. My home had no ceiling, so you could hear every drop overhead. Even now I began to snooze while I waited to see my daughter’s teacher.
I awoke from my reverie and surveyed the scene with fresh eyes. In the paved area next door, the gigantic drops formed mini-volcanoes with every splash into the pools forming everywhere. Soon the aqua-armies formed into squadrons racing urgently to drains and runoffs. Meanwhile, in the school-yard where hundreds of feet at play had worn the would-be lawn to a brown patch of bare earth sparsely littered with tufts of grass, the rain quickly saturated the compact earth and began to form brown pools of mud.
Next door there was also a well-manicured piece of lawn and on that piece of real-estate things were quite different. Every drop of rain disappeared into the greenery. The lush grass seemed to have an infinite capacity to soak up the rain like a living carpet of sponge.
Still in my zen-place, I began to think how the contrasting landscapes resemble our lives at different phases. There are times in our lives when there is a downpour. It could be an outpouring of job opportunities or maybe as we say in T&T “Yuh in season,” meaning a number of members of the opposite sex are all-of-a-sudden interested in you. It could be that we are experiencing a run of sequential successes as an athlete or performer. Whatever it is, it’s coming hard and fast and the state of our lives will determine how we handle the deluge.
If we are hard and inflexible. If we cannot see the opportunity in the out of the ordinary project thrown at us at work. If we don’t even see the person smiling at us because they are wrapped in a package that does not fit our criteria. If our hearts are closed to love. If the opportunities don’t come at us exactly the way we expect. Then they run-off of our lives like that paved courtyard. We cannot receive the gifts sent from heaven.
If we have been rundown by life, we are quickly overwhelmed. It’s too much for our barren life. Barren of a support system to pull on or maybe lacking a healthy lifestyle we quickly burn out. Maybe past relationship failures have made us emotionally destitute. Maybe we have abandoned habits of spiritual renewal. Unhealthy lifestyles quickly become a muddy pool where opportunities choke and stall.
But the life that is already thriving capitalizes on the rains of opportunity. The life that is already green with healthy relationships and physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health can soak up the downpour.
Every investment in a healthy life (on all levels) today reaps unknown benefits tomorrow. Prepare for the downpour now. Who knows when it will come but when it does, how glorious it will be if you can soak it all up and grow exponentially into the joyful life that awaits.
Joyfully,
Copyright 2017, Matik Nicholls.