Life revolves around the same conflicting paradigms with its 24 hours equally dispensed between night and day, those dual, interminable miracles that alternate in coordinated precision like unerring notes of a perfect symphony. As creatures of habit, we have structured our daily routines around the boundaries set by their recurring occurrences and frequently, our adeptness on how we balance those routines dictates our happiness or despair. Even physiologically, the circadian rhythm, our body clock that science often speaks about, will be seriously compromised when we alter those set patterns of change.
Ignoring the sense of egalitarian principles we often advocate, most of us favor one more than the other in their figurative state - light more than darkness - and only those who have stumbled unknowingly to the clutches of darkness and lost the struggle to free themselves may have preferred it in the long run. Light brings beauty and clarity to life while darkness blinds us to the wonders of what is true and real. But both are essential elements to the enjoyment of our mortal existence and their disruption tips the balance of order that should prevail in the universe. Light, with its unmitigated charm, will always outshine darkness unless one sees beyond the murky shadows and uncover the beauty that lies beneath. Because underneath the gloom, down its uncompromising depth, is the surreal path of a muti-faceted jewel of startling colors - a rainbow - beyond the ugly chasm of crippling hopelessness.
In this mortal journey, we have traveled and experienced both: a glut of darkness and rainy days more than bright summer suns for some, and scattered resplendent beams of sunlight festooned along the way for some lucky ones. Does fortune favor one more than the other? Should we begrudge life for its seeming injustice? Must we inhibit ourselves from hoping for even just a gentle ray of sunbeam because we have lost hope for a full burst of sunshine? Have we been so inured to the darkness that we have forgotten a lovely rainbow loomed beyond? Have we lost the lesson that can be learned from the challenge to find the rainbow after life had doled out thunderous roaring storms all along? Do we fret we will never find our way through the dancing shadows in the rain?
On the other hand, for those who are fortunate to live a charmed life seldom touched by rainy days, have they missed the beauty of the rainbow, the refreshing touch of the falling rain to a face upturned toward the sky? Has the glorious sun robbed them of the beauty that comes from the calm after a raging storm? Has the sun completely lured them to its blinding beauty that they somehow failed to appreciate the exquisite colors of the rainbow after a cleansing rain?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned a poem of bleak imagery that somehow encapsulates such mood:
The Rainy Day
"The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the moldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the moldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all.
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary."
At one point or another in life, we have taken them for granted: the rainbow, that multi-colored wonder of nature, as well as the sun, that brilliant orb of light, and the lessons they offer. We despair and lose hope for golden suns when we are burdened by the vicissitudes and tribulations that are staples of earth life. We become soft and malleable to the harsh shadows of reality that are supposed to toughen us when we are shielded by the brightness of the sun so when the rainy days come, we focus on the swirling dark clouds and completely miss the beauty that they hide. Life is not just an experiential realm; it is a school of learning, albeit a stern quasi-master that teaches us powerful lessons that, when applied with wisdom and soberness, define and shape us into that special flesh and blood entity of intrinsic value, and ultimately, into an eternal, pure, and precious spirit that God wants us to be.
Rain, dark clouds, and the gloomy dismal feelings that we often encounter before the appearance of a glorious rainbow are stark contrasts to the brilliant, warm, shimmering summer sun that creates a needed lift to a drab, cheerless mood. No life has a monopoly of either and there are lessons to be learned from both. We always long to be greeted by the lovely morning sun but there is a different brand of beauty we cannot fail to miss if we look past the darkness and the rain that precede a magnificent rainbow. Life is not a day of golden summers, not a romp on misty meadows of bright-colored fragrant blooms. But neither it is a dark day of unabated, pouring rain of despair and desolation. Rather, there are swatches of both in each life to make us appreciate their opposing beauties. When we learn to conflate the salient and profound instructions they unfailingly bring, that unfettered understanding of a divine, prescient hand in our lives will carry us through. The rainy days, however long they may last, always hold beyond the clouds a marvelous, opalescent rainbow, a promise, solid and unbroken, of days of golden suns.
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