We make our plans -- baseball games, picnics, outdoor weddings -- and then it rains, forcing us to scramble and come up with a Plan B. The lawn doesn't get mowed, we walk to other buildings hefting umbrellas and wearing raincoats or even garbage bag ponchos. We curse life's uncertainties.
I feel most alive during uncertainties. Uncertainties bring change -- sometimes good, sometimes bad. Uncertainties call out my best self. They call for my bravery, my need to connect with my friends for support, my ingenuity, my speaking truth to power.
I have always faced uncertainty head-on. I call myself a child of the storm, because I take my righteous anger, my ethics and morals, my frustration, and fashion them into an arrow to shoot into the eye of the storm. This is part of the reason I write -- my stories are arrows to shoot with the hope that they will hit their targets -- the banal evils of our world.
Rain, gentle rain, is a reminder that the storm doesn't always come with its thunder and lightning and high winds, or as an assurance that the maelstrom has passed.
Rain reminds us that we don't have perfect control of life.
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On Monday, I had a suspicious mole removed from my arm. This isn't unusual -- as I have more than fifty moles on my body, I am at higher risk for melanoma than most people. This is the fourth mole, however, and the other three were benign, so chances are this one is also. But it is uncertainty right now. Don't worry; I handle uncertainty well. I am, after all, a child of the storm.
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