Advice from a shoebox

Embrace the rain.

“To embrace melancholy is essentially to embrace the rain.”

I won’t say I’ve experienced serious depression but like most people who live in the northern hemisphere I’ve felt the sadness of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). This winter in Toronto has been greyer than grey. We haven’t even had fifty shades of grey. Three shades, tops. Three shades of grey is at least 94% less sexy than fifty. A lot of times you don't know what you have until you miss it, including blue skies and sun on your face, but I'd say most people know they're missing out on sunshine. I guess what I've never understood is the desire to address this through artificial means, such as hyper-dosing vitamin D, spray tans or lying on a tanning bed. There's also the danger of too much sun, which seems almost absurd given that most of us in the north are suffering from lack of it. Of course, surfers and retirees in Australia are the world's leaders in melanoma, but here above the 49th, we are leaders in vitamin D deficiency. Though, to be honest, I'm not even thinking about the actual health implications of too much or too little sun. I just miss it.

I'll admit this here, but on occasion, in the doldrums of grey season, I'll hear the song Here Comes the Sun, and I'll get weepy. A little drop of dew forms in the corners of my eyes. A mistiness overcomes me. The beauty of seeing the sun reappear captured in song by a Brit who, no doubt, felt the weight of winter's grey like one of those vinyl covered x-ray blankets that cloak you during some miserable medical examination. What makes the grey even worse, when you live in a city, is it can really soak into your skin, radiating from the reflective glass of faceless towers, the concrete sidewalks spotted with discarded chewing gum, charred bits of cigarettes, dog crap and other detritus of city life. When the snow melts and exposes the cultch and grit of a grimy town, there is nowhere to hide the ugliness of the built world. Even the remains of the natural world, the rotten sludge of the previous autumn's leaves, the wet rotting twigs, the pigeon feather stuck to some splodge are all so grim. It drains you. It drains the blood from your face. It drains the life force from your aura. It drains the light from your eyes, while it empties into the sewer grates that emanate the foulness below. The air is so sour you intuitively understand the Victorians' fear of sickening miasma.

Then, one day, the sun returns and it strikes you like no drug every could. The giddiness is palpable. You can taste that bright radiation as it penetrates your eyes and beams directly into your soul. So lifted am I by its power I feel renewed and undefeated. The very cells of your body seem to call out in a massive choral cheer, we made it!

Don't get me wrong, a rainy day can have its charms. The plip-plop of rain on the hood of a jacket or dappled drops on a skylight can be as beautiful as anything else. Yet the unbroken 10% grey-white of Toronto skies not only block out the sun, but the stars and moon at night. Despite the potential for seeing the Northern Lights in southern Ontario, there's no hope of the solar charged light show breaking through a layer of so flat and dim here that you might mistake it for the ceiling of an inflated dome. Then again, perhaps it's all in my head. There's this idea that resiliency comes from a sort of "stick-to-itiveness". As in sports, you can tough it out by stubbornness, by putting your head down and pushing through, which has always been my approach. From a difficult problem at work, to a steep hill on the bike, I would go so far as to say I pride myself on this trait. The only thing I've ever done well in sport and exercise is my willingness to suffer. In fact, in cycling, it's seen as a bit of a superpower. Just how long you can suffer will lead you to, if not win the day, then at least win the respect of your competitors.

There is another idea though. One that claims you can be mentally tougher by being open to change. The elasticity of our brains is a real superpower and by taking advantage of elastic or flexible thinking (different from neuroplasticity though just as powerful) you can become more resilient. Essentially, if you unstick yourself from stick-to-itiveness, abandon ideas that are conventional, allow for ambiguity, allow your imagination to roam, accept how you feel about it (be it anxious, angry or sad), reframe questions or problems, be willing to experiment and allow yourself to fail and try something different you will find unique ways to solve problems and come up with new ideas.

In this sense, maybe I just need a new way to see this greyness. A year ago, I gave up on the constant battle for trying to find clothing "breathable and water resistant" as sheer bollocks. Gore-tex is such an overhyped solution that only works in a very narrow environment that I rarely find myself in. Instead of trying to weatherproof fabric or leather shoes, I purchased rubber boots from a Swedish company, Stutterheim. Surprisingly, on the inside of the lid of the shoebox was this text:

“TO EMBRACE MELANCHOLY IS ESSENTIALLY TO EMBRACE THE RAIN.
It may be the fault of the rain, or of anything else around us or within us.
Remember that it's when you feel discomfort in life, that's when you make change. If everything were great all the time, if every day was a happy day, then we would just sit there and get nothing done. We believe that melancholy inspires creativity and change. So embrace it. You can start by embracing the rain.“

The old adage about there being no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing is a cliché. Genuinely, weather is just something that happens, whether it's crap or not. Weather doesn't happen with intention. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of bad clothing in the world. In the end, I think you can't be willing to try something new without the ability to push yourself, so in that way, the idea of elastic thinking and a willingness to suffer can go hand in hand. I don't think weeks of rain and flat grey skies will ever bring me joy or a tsunami of creativity but at the very least I can embrace it and lean into it. Play the sad songs, turn the lights on during the day, don the rain gear and get on with it and when the sun comes back, make hay, turn your face to that distant star and say, "Welcome back, we missed you."