The Weather Doesn’t Care

It is odd that we have an opinion on the weather.

There is this force that has existed on the planet since long before us, and which will exist long after us, barring some kind of catastrophe. It is made up of all these different factors that interact on global scale and affects every single person on Earth. It creates snowstorms and droughts and tornadoes and hurricanes and floods. It determines how much food we have to eat and how many bugs there are and how population is distributed. It is constant and ever present and it always has been.

But, for some reason, we feel like having an opinion on it is valid. If it is agreeable and lets us play golf or ride our bike or take our kids to the park it gets a thumbs up. If it is not agreeable and we have to stay home or warm our car up a few minutes early or it rains when we wanted to shoot our bow and arrow in our backyard we are not happy and it does not get our seal of approval.

And the weather doesn’t care. Not even a little bit.

We do this a lot in our lives. We spend a lot of this very limited time we have to be alive shaking our heads or our fists at things that we have no control over like traffic jams and the news pre-empting our show and other humans who have their own agenda and desires and wants. We wish our kids would learn to listen and that Costco would just open at 8am like a normal freaking store and that our next door neighbor would clean up their backyard because it looks like those terrorist training camps they used to show on Al Qaeda recruitment videos.

And all of this wishing and wanting and complaining has no effect on the world around us at all, and it just makes us unhappy and puts us at odds with what is. Even worse, we miss out on a lot of cool stuff because we are too busy having an opinion on how it “should” be.

I find that the fewer opinions I have, especially about things I have no say in, the happier I am. I am not sure where I got the idea that my opinion is valid or useful or legitimate, but I did and it seems to only cause me difficulty. I am not sure why I am attached to my opinion or why having things my way is important even, because almost all of the good things I have in life have come from circumstances that I had no control over, and would probably have changed if I had.

Any time I find myself unhappy or discontent or just being a jerk I try to ask myself what I am not accepting or what I am at odds with. If it is something I can change then I consider doing that, but if it is not I have to wonder what the purpose of having an opinion about it is.