Rain rain go away...

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day. Back then it was simple. We wanted to go outside to run around barefoot. Rain was the enemy because it interrupted play, and that felt like a perfectly reasonable grievance at seven years old.

Now I am grown, and I caught myself thinking the exact same thing today.

Rain, rain, go away.

I was singing it not because I wanted to play, but because I had plans. I had already mapped out the day in my head, and just as I was stepping out, it started raining, alternating between a heavy down pour and a light shower with no plan of stopping. 

What surprised me was not the rain itself, but was how quickly I became irritated by it. Now that my plans were ruined, I was forced to sit there with the irritation for a moment, and it actually felt slightly embarrassing. I do not actually hate rain. I hate disruption. I hate when something I did not schedule interferes with something I carefully planned. I hate when my perfectly planned day just collapses just like that. I was chatting with a friend who was doing laundry when it started raining and we realised it was not that we hate inconvenience, but we hate losing control.

Rain does not consult our calendars before it falls. It does not care about our plans and urgent meetings and whatnot. It simply falls, and then we blame it for everything. The flooding? It is the rain. The traffic? It is the rain. The delays? Obviously, the rain.

But we know it is not. 

When parts of Kampala flood after two hours of steady rain, is the problem really water? Or is it drainage that was never properly planned? When roads become rivers, is rain being vengeful, or is it our infrastructure failing under pressure?

Rain is just water. It is consistent and fairly predictable, even. We know when it will come (to a large extent despite changing seasons). The issue is rarely the rain itself, but what we built or didn’t build to handle it.

And I wonder if the same thing happens in our own lives.

We say rain ruined our mood, but maybe we were already slightly irritated. We say rain destroyed the plan, but maybe the plan had no flexibility to begin with. We say rain delayed everything, but maybe everything was already running on thin margins.

Rain becomes the scapegoat because it is easier to blame the sky and water than to admit fragility. It is easier to curse the clouds than to question the structure.

As children, we sang rain away because we wanted to play outside. As adults, we still sing it away, just a little bit more quietly, because we have built lives that only work when the weather is perfect, when nothing interrupts us, when traffic flows, when schedules align and everything behaves as it should. 

Maybe that is why rain unsettles us. It reminds us that control is a bit of an illusion. It reminds us that not everything will work in accordance with our plans. It exposes how quickly we panic when something small shifts.

From where my feet are, listening to the rain, I realised the problem is not the rain. The rain was doing what rain has always done. The issue was that me and my plans could not handle a little pressure. 

So instead of singing rain, rain, go away, I need to ask myself  if a small storm disrupts me this much, how stable was my structure to begin with?