Hail and Dry Pavement
Chaotic Weather, Change, and the Self
Lately, I cannot help but obsess over chaos and absurdity. I think of these as intertwined, necessitating each other. And I’m not thinking of them only systemically—like how terribly funny it is to be kept waiting in a line of bureaucracy as Kafka thought of it, but also in a much simpler way. We cannot tell our bodies what foods to crave when. We cannot seem to understand why one thought brings us to another. Sometimes we can’t even tell what the weather will do day to day. We can’t understand what it is that makes us love to push ourselves away from what might bring us a truer sense of joy. And in the same way we cannot tell ourselves to change, or stay consistent. Each day we seem to shift, alter ourselves and our being into some new mold we found the previous day, and we might wish to stay in that mold in that “best” form of ourselves or even push ourselves into that “better being.” But consistency seems to evaporate immediately as the word is thought.
As someone said of the weather to ABC7 news, “First, it’s snowing, then it’s raining, then it’s super hot. Come on, make up your mind!” And it won’t, and we just live with what the weather gives us. With whatever gusts come our way.
However, I find myself truly feeling this, not in the cold, or the rains, but in the hail.
Hail, according to NOAA, is created when small pieces of rain are picked up by an updraft in the middle of a thunderstorm. As it is pushed into the updraft it enters into colder areas of the atmosphere where it freezes until they are too heavy to stay in the updraft or the updraft stops completely, letting the bits of hail fall. The bits of freezing water either become ice, quickly making them white, or they freeze slowly, making them clear. This is hail, one moment of change in the updraft of some unremarkable cloud during a rain, making me wish I was already home as I slip on Highway 13.
A friend told me the other day that the point of any sort of therapy or self-help is to see who you really are, truly understand yourself. That’s it. What you do from there is up to you. He also said that we cannot stay the same, that the idea of the self is a misnomer. The self, at least what we see it as, is only something that pops out from the din of things, and is shifted—simply put, it is water, or clay, something malleable and almost inevitably predetermined to change. I want to stay consistent, simple, peaceful. But I can’t. I see many others around me wanting the same. We cannot have it. What self-help tells us is that we can’t keep changing, we must find perfect equilibrium with ourselves. But such a thing doesn’t exist. There is always, everyday, something new in your routine. There is always a shift. However small, it is there. Much like the rains, then the snow, now the cold that sealed the door of my car this morning, I can’t stay put. I’m not sure anyone can.
I picture the hail forming in the cloud, little bits of water in the atmosphere floating in and out of drafts like leaves or spiders on silk, finding their way, waving into a thunderstorm to dance around before being denied and let go, then thrown harshly away to the ground.
Driving home from Berkeley up Highway 13, hail began to fall from the sky. I’m not sure I remember the sound of thunder earlier, but at that moment that wasn’t important. What was important was that I drive slow, the car slipping slightly almost as though I were driving in snow. I basically was. People passed me by going the regular speed limit, perhaps believing that there was no real need to drive differently, ice covering the ground. Eventually the hail grew so loud, each stone so large, that I wondered how I could escape it, and if my windshield would survive. But I tried to forget the thought, and kept driving as the hail grew louder, just trying to focus on the road in front of me. Eventually, nearing home, the hail stopped. I passed over a hill in East Oakland, and the ground was dry, having last seen rain maybe a couple of hours before.