A Time for Renewal

โApril showers bring May flowers.โ
I remember hearing that saying as a child. Granted, I typically heard it when the April showers were interfering with my playing outside. And what good are May flowers to a child trying to have fun in April? I couldnโt appreciate its wisdom in my youth but with age comes understanding, and in time I understood that the homily was filled with multiple meanings – everything from a message of patience and โgood things come to those who waitโ to โeverything has a reasonโ.
And as I reflect on that homily even later in life I made another realization. I donโt remember much emphasis being put on the idea that April showers had their own beauty. While it might be nice that they brought May flowers, nice that they melted away the last of the snows of winter (which by April in New England seemed to have lasted forever), the April showers had a meaning, purpose and beauty of their own.
There is beauty in rain, and those things we often associate with rain, such as loss, sadness, or internal contemplation of an exquisitely melancholy nature. A slowdown, a reflection, and a crying of tears are not bad things when we put them into perspective.
Unfortunately, we have lost sight of the much-needed value of those things in our current society. We are always hurrying everything along for our own convenience. We want sadness, grief, and loss to be instantaneous, to leave us as quickly as they struck and then move on as if nothing had happened. We prioritize expedience over experience.
If we donโt move on, if we are sad for more than seven days, that may satisfy the criterion for breaking out the prescription pad. Perhaps if we could better dealt with our grief, allowed ourselves to truly experience and grow from our sadness and losses and allowed them to mature us, we wouldnโt have to rush to the pill bottle to separate ourselves from our pains. For you see, it is oftentimes not the one pain that leads to the need for drugs, but the dozens of pains, losses, and hurts that we never fully processed, and sometimes were not allowed to process, which sooner or later lead to the falling of the house of cards.
We move into action, addiction, and avoidance of our true feelings because they cannot be neatly filed away within the ninety minutes of the movies we grew up with.
If one does not fully engage in the process, does not experience what the process has to teach them, and does not participate or grow in that process, then how can we expect the April showers in our lives to bring us anything but a garden full of weeds?
If you want flowers, you must first allow yourself to experience the showers for real. Who knows? You may find yourself singing in the rain long before the flowers bloom.