Water felt good. Even the cold that had
descended from the clouds was nice on the skin and bones. Everything seemed
alien in a way, covered by the storm and a fog that was thick and somber.
Sitting on a bench in the park didn’t feel like something normal, but so wasn’t
the absence of people or of any kinds of sounds. It seemed as if the world had
lost all of its inhabitants in a single moment and it was glorious. He sat
there, not minding anything but the was happening right then and there. It was
amazing.
There were no birds, no dogs or cars turning
the corner. There were no people talking on cellphones or others talking loudly
with their coworkers. There were no babies or children or teenagers whose
hormones made even more sounds than the storm. No one else was around. Only
rainfall made noise and, occasionally, a thunder or two would break the peace,
as if it was announcing its presence and power. All of that was beautiful and
very special and something people would rarely stop to really perceive.
Granted, storms like that one were not that
common, even in the rainy season. But people should’ve taken advantage of them
more often because, it almost seems that you can listen to deeper sounds when
you have the chaos and calm of a storm. It’s almost as if you could listen to
yourself, to what your deep feelings are really telling you. It’s such a
peaceful state and place to be that it becomes almost as a temple. Of course,
prayer is not mandatory but you could do that if you wanted to, if it was up to
you.
The man was drenched, from top to bottom. He
wore a hat that was now almost black because of the water, a t-shirt, jeans and
sneakers. Everything was flooded with water. Yet, he seemed to be thinking, he
seemed to be really taking advantage of the moment. Maybe he didn’t get to
meditate a lot at home or maybe it was just a way to breathe a little before
the end of the storm came, which would eventually come. He seemed to feel every
drop of rain on his body, every single water stream coming down his limbs.
Two consecutive thunders and their lightings
lit up the sky and made it look so different; that it was a shame more people
weren’t outside enjoying nature. Sadly, people only learn to love when they get
something in return and that includes nature. If she behaves in a way that its
natural but that takes away something from mankind, then humans do not want
anything to have with it and they even declare war against it. Humans never
really learn to enjoy things as they are. Instead, they want to world to be
what their image of it is in their brains, and that image is almost always
highly inaccurate.
The storm continued for several hours.
Eventually, silence was broken by cars and people running to them and buses and
trains and planes, in order to get home safe and hopefully fast. Then, at
night, silence came again. The darkness made it all even more silent, more
serious in a way. Now that most people were at home, relaxing in the world that
they had build for themselves, they really didn’t care at all about what was
happening outside their homes, not even caring if there were people like them
outside, the less fortunate.
In general terms, they really were unfortunate
souls. They had difficult access to every single thing that a human being
needed to survive and they didn’t have a home, which would cause several
problems for any normal human being. However, they were much more in touch with
nature than other people. They loved to have animals on their side and they
learned from their surroundings about how to survive many things. Nature taught
them everything they needed to know, if they listened and paid any attention.
At those hours of the night, no one would do
the same thing that the man did during the day. No one would sit on a park
bench and just wonder about life, not even if the night was perfectly clear and
warm. The weather came in second or even third after the dangers of the city.
They could be deprived of any soul and dangerous because of those people that
have evolved to feel they permanently need to take away from others. It’s a
disease that many have inside their brains and it grows and cannot ever be
eradicated.
As they say: “once a thief, always a thief”.
And it’s a true saying because no one really stops being something like that.
Once you think you have the right to take someone else’s belongings, you will
never stop perceiving the world like that. It’s not that some steal because
they are poor, less fortunate or just hate society and everything in it. No,
it’s because they have gotten used to it, they have started to like scaring
people in parks at night, cornering them and threatening their life. They have
become addicts to that feeling.
It is power that they love and even during
storms at night, they will come out and try to cure their obsession by doing
the only thing they feel they know what to do. They can be caught by police and
send to jail for a short time, but that rush will not come down. Once you’ve
felt power, you just cannot let go, especially in a world where only a few fortunate
souls really do have power, mostly in the form of money. If someone outside
that circle gets to feel a little bit of that, they simply become remarkably
obsesses and they continue fulfilling that rush until they can’t, for one
reason or the other.
Anyway, stormy nights belong to no one, just
as stormy days. No one can claim them; no one really knows how to describe the
feeling of it all, how special it really is to finally being able to talk to
your real self and to connect with nature. It’s different for everyone; so one
experience is not really similar to any other. They are just as us humans,
similar in key aspects but vastly different in what really counts. And that’s a
fact that nature imbued into us, making us realize how really complex life is.
The same feeling can be experienced when snow
begins to fall or when you experience the natural darkness of the wild. You can
also fill it when you dive deep into the water or when you swim in the ocean.
It’s just something that is more than all of us combined, something that we can
only experience privately. If we do feel it, if we really achieve that point,
we will simply find it very complicated to use appropriate words to describe
what it’s all about. After all, it really is a personal experience, different
for each one of us.
We have been led to believe that, as humans,
we are precious and very special. And a way, we are, because we exist out of
pure luck. We just happened, like a miracle, and now we are here doubting every
single thing that surrounds us or worst, no even stopping to look at our
surroundings. We believe that our brains are a masterpiece but most of us
rarely use them properly because we just don’t have to. The world has stopped
trying and now we just have to do a small amount of things to be a successful human.
Of course, that is only in rich countries. In
the rest of the world it is even worse because we still think we are miracles
but we do not see any advantages of that anywhere. We try and try and try and
nothing works and that’s how people get frustrated and they do whatever comes
first in their heads. So, that special
part of us is just useless, like having the world’s most expensive object but
not being able to sell it because it has become something more than just a very
expensive object, whatever it might be.
What really makes us special is how we choose
to live life and how we decide to learn about ourselves. Thinking and precisely
using the tools we were giving at birth is precisely what makes us special, not
just having those tools. Anyone can do anything but not all of us can do it the
right way.
So just go out into the storm, drench yourself
in water and make yourself feel. All those other things are not us, all those
objects and people. They do not matter when don’t even know where we are and
who we are. In order to live properly, we should really learn to look inside
and around ourselves.
