How the rain makes us remember. . . . How the rain makes us look ahead. . . .

Yesterday, I stood outside on the half-drenched concrete, watching as the clouds formed a mild grey above me. It was the first rain of the season. The pungent sweet smell of dry asphalt filled the air around me— it was the fragrance of parched earth— and I knew that the summer had finally ended.

What fascination I have with the rain can perhaps be explained by the melancholy musings that, from time to time, I find myself yielding to, evoking memory, heightening regret. Indeed, there is a certain sadness that accompanies the rain: a certain constant, dull, nagging loneliness that seeps into soul and being, intensifying longing, leaving one cold and wet. It is a loneliness that we need from time to time, I guess, if only to remind us that we are still human.

Just this morning, as the rain fell hard on my way to work, I remembered those comfortable drives, cold and fuzzy on similar rainy days, as I went early to Rockwell, when I was still a student of law. I remembered the simplicity and the rhythm by which we lived our lives, a simplicity which we did not then realize, because we were too caught up in our small petty issues. (If only we knew!) There was a comfort in the regularity of those days, a security of seeing the same people, the confidence of doing the same things. And I remembered also the mild excitement of the possibility that classes would be called-off, and the plans that suddenly materialized in order to pass the time. But most of all, this morning's rain reminded me of the people I left behind there, who surely went ahead together with me, but became, inadvertently (myself as well), different people. Who were we in first year law school, second year, third year, fourth year, do you still remember?

Indeed, it is some comfort to know that even in the midst of these seemingly jarring changes (I thought), it is still the same rain that falls. In that great cycle of nature, the water which fell upon our backs as we crossed with our books to our classes and to our friends, will fall again, as we cross to different places and seek wider horizons. It is this promise of the rain that I remember as I cross the street to work today, under a different and perhaps greyer sky than what I had known before.

Indeed, that the rain will fall is certain: a signal that seasons change. Yet in that change, I put faith in the fact that nothing is lost, nothing is wasted. As the Spanish say, nada se pierde, todo se transforma. The rain is a reassuring reminder.