Column from Sunday's Paper

NOTE: This post may look familier but that's because my column in Sunday's paper evolved from a blog post. I hope you don't mind.
Whining about the weather
I stood at the garden door tonight and watched lightening gouge jagged troughs through the night sky. Soon the rain came and I opened the back door so I could hear the storm pound the roof like a drum. 


Our chimes probably drive our neighbors crazy when the wind blows, but I love the music they make.


We don’t have gutters, so when the rain comes rushing off the eves it splatters on the deck. Standing there tonight, the rain drenched my bare legs and it felt good.


Every season has its pros and cons. I have to come clean here and “fess up” that I’ve complained about the heat this summer. 


Jilda and I played at an arts festival in Fultondale last week and our set started at 2:30 p.m. The ambient temperature was 96 at show time, but combined with drinkable humidity, it felt like it was 110 degrees.


I could have baked a cake in my guitar case, and by the time we stepped off stage an hour later there was not a dry thread on either of us. I reached for the door handle of my black truck (what was I thinking?) and the handle burned a small Ford emblem across my palm.


It’s easy to whine about the heat, but the angle of the evening light is changing and each day is a little shorter than the one before. Soon we’ll start seeing color in the leaves and before we know it, we’ll be cursing the north wind, and ice on our windshields.


We’ll be thinking about things we could do if only the sun would shine and warm the day.


A lesson that would serve us all well is to be content with now. No matter what’s happening on the outside, if we could learn to find contentment on the inside, I think we’d all lead healthier, happier lives.


I read a quote by the Dalai Lama that seems fitting here “….man is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.” I could have written for days and not said it as well.


Being content with now is not easy. For the most part, we are where we are right now because of the decisions we’ve made at some point in the past. That can be a bitter pill to swallow. It’s much easier to blame the weather, the spouse, the parents, the boss, the government, or something else for our unhappiness.


Viktor K. Frankl who lived through Nazi concentration camps and withstood unspeakable horror, said one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life — “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitudes.”


I think we all need to remember these words the next time we feel compelled to whine about the weather.