Rain, Rain, Wash my pain away

 The pitter patter of rain on the window, the gurgling of water down the sink, the feel of the warm shower when it hits your skin on a cold winter morning, the smell of the wet grass on a dewy morning. Water has power, it has energy like all things in this world; animate and inanimate. The flow of water rejuvenates life, it makes me feel alive when I take a shower and all of my senses are activated. Drinking cold water on a searing summer day is perhaps one of the best feelings in the world. It pumps life back into the lifeless husk of dead plants and life would cease to exist without it. 

Water has a special relationship with anxiety. Where in water marches onwards, mightily charging into the unknown taking the path of least resistance, anxiety perhaps is the compete opposite to it. It over thinks, it questions every choice and it doubts itself to the point of self defeat. Anxiety is not all bad, just as in water is not all good. Rather, it is how we perceive them that matters. Responding to one’s fears and anxieties has been one of the great reasons of man’s evolution forward, making up your own questions and then answering them and looking for universal solutions are all derived from the belief, that things can be better which in turn derives itself from the belief, “that things are not good enough right now”.

On the search for universal truths and actually on the search for any answer, one often goes through various anxieties, mostly existential, revealing themselves in the form of day to day life. However, the last step to every answer, almost invariably is a blind leap forwards, kind of like water. A self belief or a sense of trusting oneself is required, to march onwards without caring for the consequences. To answer any question, one must become so involved with the question that he starts embodying it himself. To reach that point, questioning oneself and the context and thinking is crucial. And then to reach for the answer, one must let that part go and settle on a solution. This is because the perfect answer or perfection is unattainable thus we always settle for the closest solution after the leap forwards into the unknown. And a new discovery or a new perspective on the world emerges…..

Perhaps the point of life, in it's minuteness, answering a simple question which we answer hundreds of each day, and in it’s vastness is the same. Making us realize that this life is to be experienced and lived rather than controlled or solved, however a person can’t do one without the other. Experiencing life is the specialty of the water, which flows onwards uncaring and ambivalent about the universe, however to reach that point one has to go through phases of anxiety, even crippling anxiety in which you come to the stark realization of how uncaring the universe is, or how meaningless our existence is in the grand scheme of things. Once we face that part of ourselves, we can then be like water embracing every moment in it’s entirety, without any expectation, judgment or evaluation.