How can life be good when storms are coming?
If you spend time summer camping on the beach, you may witness a weather pattern that is known called a sea-breeze front. As the winds blow in from the ocean, the cooler air over the water meets the warmer air over the land. This forms what is called a convergence zone. If the air is humid and conditions are right, clouds will build up, gathering moist air over land. How strong the breeze is blowing in from the ocean can determine where Mother Nature dumps all that moisture in the form of rain and possible thunder storms.
Usually when people are camping, rain in not one of natures features that you want to experience. Scrambling around and covering up things is not fun.
Recently, I was camping on a sand dune, when my camping neighbor stepped out of his tent and asked me if there were “storms a coming”? I looked at the sky, thought for a moment, and replied that I didn’t think so. Pointing west with my finger, I told him that I thought folks west of us, a little more inland, might get wet. He looked at the sky again, concerned that maybe those storms were building up to rain down on his camping trip. I let him know that I had seen some real gully washers at this campground. But this time I was choosing to think that those rain clouds were not coming here.
His concern got me to thinking about the personal and emotional storms that approach all of us in our daily lives. We all have those times in our lives when we think that storms are coming. We think we see problems coming in our relationships. Or maybe a sneeze or two leads us to thinking that an illness is coming our way. Maybe obstacles to growing and expanding our business appear to be getting larger and larger. That noise in your car that you think is going to cost a lot of money to repair. The list of storms that we think are headed our way can seem huge.
With each approaching storm, we need to focus on what it is that we want to happen, not what we think that storm could bring into our life. It seems that every time I allow myself to dwell on what bad things can be approaching, more bad things show up in an attempt to keep me in that repetitive cycle of thought.
Attitudes towards thought are habits. It’s easy to get over whelmed with one bad thing after another. If we allow ourselves to rise each morning worrying about what bad things are going to happen, we can never see the good that is out there as well. We must make a conscious decision to think about thoughts before thinking them.
It’s not as confusing as it sounds. Just think that whatever appears to be a storm-a-coming could just as well turn the opposite way or dissipate before it gets too close. That relationship that looked stormy could turn out to be crossed wires in a conversation. Those couple of sneezes, just some dust in the air. The financial climate may change, resulting in more business than you ever believed possible. And your mechanic may find that the noise in your car was simply a loose clamp.
If the sky at your beach is half sunny and half cloudy, choose sunny. Life is always brighter in the sunshine. The only thing that makes darkness go away is light.
Did you think today that there were storms-a-coming and life is still good?
Namaste,
Dj
PS, By the way….my beach camping neighbor…..he let the storm thoughts go, had a wonderful camping dinner with his family…..and he never felt a drop of rain.