There's a saying that I've been thinking of lately: "Life isn't just about learning to weather the storms. It's about learning to dance in the rain." The more I think about that adage, the more it seems to make sense. The general advice given by well-meaning friends and family to someone going through rough times is to "stay strong", or "chin up", or "nothing lasts forever". They want us to be the happy, positive person that they know we can be, as opposed to the sad, depressed, upset, wallowing mess that we become under intense circumstancial duress.
There's a scene in the movie Forrest Gump where the character Lieutenant Dan is in the crow's nest of the shrimp boat during a hurricane. He's screaming at the storm, laughing at the storm, defying the intensity of the storm that would cause most of us to run for cover or cower in fear. Now that may not be "dancing in the rain" ala Gene Kelly, but in my book it's similar. Dancing seems to be a subjective verb that's open to interpretation.
Sometimes the "storms" in life aren't so much huge hurricanes that arrive, end, and leave us to make sense of the levels of perceived disaster left in their wake. Sometimes the "storms" are seemingly constant squalls that feel like they're beginning to let up & give us some peace, but then another one hits, and another, and another, so that it doesn't ever seem that we're given a chance to truly breathe and move beyond the pain of the ones before. To truly begin to enjoy that sunshine and calm that happens after an intense storm. In the movie, Forrest and Lieutenant Dan are catapulted into a successful business thanks to that hurricane and their tenacity in not going back to port to hide from it. It's not so simple to find the proverbial rainbow after the weathering of, or "dancing" in the rain of all of life's storms. When it seems that everytime you find the strength to begin to get back up and put a smile on your face to handle life, another one hits to knock you back to your knees .... well, those rainbows don't appear through the clouds in a very apparent fashion.
The thing about it is, all of those moments of circumstancial duress are not always random storms that appear and wreak havoc without our input. Ultimately, our own decisions bring us to find almost every so-called storm. Some of them are simply life passage storms, like the death of someone we chose to love, the breakup of a relationship we chose to be in, the leaving home of a child we chose to have. Those seem intensely sad while going through, but the rainbows afterwards are easy to discern when we eventually look for them. Some of them are more definitively our own doing in bringing the onset of, like financial issues or legal trouble. Some of them, while ultimately tracing back to decisions we've made, aren't as easy to admit they're at least partially of our own making, like recovering from various diseases or addictions or injuries ..... so the "dancing" could really be confronting and embracing the pain in whatever form. Not just cowering from it or attempting to ignore it until it's buried so deep it feels like it's gone, but truly facing it head on and embracing its existence so that it can ultimately be understood and moved beyond. Dancing in the rain, embracing the rain, understanding the rain, accepting the rain ...... moving beyond the rain. Synonyms? Maybe if we didn't pigeonhole the verb dancing, the rainbows, or at least a bit of sunshine, would be easier to find in life.
~ The Girl In The Little Black Dress
There's a scene in the movie Forrest Gump where the character Lieutenant Dan is in the crow's nest of the shrimp boat during a hurricane. He's screaming at the storm, laughing at the storm, defying the intensity of the storm that would cause most of us to run for cover or cower in fear. Now that may not be "dancing in the rain" ala Gene Kelly, but in my book it's similar. Dancing seems to be a subjective verb that's open to interpretation.
Sometimes the "storms" in life aren't so much huge hurricanes that arrive, end, and leave us to make sense of the levels of perceived disaster left in their wake. Sometimes the "storms" are seemingly constant squalls that feel like they're beginning to let up & give us some peace, but then another one hits, and another, and another, so that it doesn't ever seem that we're given a chance to truly breathe and move beyond the pain of the ones before. To truly begin to enjoy that sunshine and calm that happens after an intense storm. In the movie, Forrest and Lieutenant Dan are catapulted into a successful business thanks to that hurricane and their tenacity in not going back to port to hide from it. It's not so simple to find the proverbial rainbow after the weathering of, or "dancing" in the rain of all of life's storms. When it seems that everytime you find the strength to begin to get back up and put a smile on your face to handle life, another one hits to knock you back to your knees .... well, those rainbows don't appear through the clouds in a very apparent fashion.
The thing about it is, all of those moments of circumstancial duress are not always random storms that appear and wreak havoc without our input. Ultimately, our own decisions bring us to find almost every so-called storm. Some of them are simply life passage storms, like the death of someone we chose to love, the breakup of a relationship we chose to be in, the leaving home of a child we chose to have. Those seem intensely sad while going through, but the rainbows afterwards are easy to discern when we eventually look for them. Some of them are more definitively our own doing in bringing the onset of, like financial issues or legal trouble. Some of them, while ultimately tracing back to decisions we've made, aren't as easy to admit they're at least partially of our own making, like recovering from various diseases or addictions or injuries ..... so the "dancing" could really be confronting and embracing the pain in whatever form. Not just cowering from it or attempting to ignore it until it's buried so deep it feels like it's gone, but truly facing it head on and embracing its existence so that it can ultimately be understood and moved beyond. Dancing in the rain, embracing the rain, understanding the rain, accepting the rain ...... moving beyond the rain. Synonyms? Maybe if we didn't pigeonhole the verb dancing, the rainbows, or at least a bit of sunshine, would be easier to find in life.
~ The Girl In The Little Black Dress
