Have you ever danced in the rain?
It’s a surreal feeling.
The best part is that it doesn’t need to be choreographed. You can do a little wiggle, throw in a twirl. You can sing at the top of your lungs if you’d like.
Or you can just roam in silence and dance in your mind. Free from any earthly confines.
What inhibits us from dancing in the rain? You might say you don’t know how to dance. That’s not true, just be YOU. It’s not like anyone’s watching. And even if people are watching, their judgement is as meaningless as a grain of sand in the ocean.
You might also ask why. Why should I dance in the rain and not the sun? Why would I want to dance when the sky is gloomy and the air so piercingly cold. Why should I dance when the sky is crying?
We illustrate sunshine as the solution to rain, the saviour of the itsy bitsy spider. We pit happiness against sadness and it’s always one over the other. But are they not mutually reliant? Without the preexistence of sadness, what do I know about how it feels to be happy? Why don’t we conflate the two? When I am sad I am at my happiest, tears stream down my cheeks but I glow.
I dare say that rain and sunshine together make a rainbow.
If you keep waiting for that one good day, you might be waiting a long long time. So what about the fallout that happens between now and then? And when that good day finally, finally comes, what if you’re too numb and worn to rejoice in life again?
We typically only dance in the most ideal of settings because there is something to dance for. But by dancing in the rain, I’m not suggesting that we mask over painful struggles of emotion with something more palatable. Instead, I see it as an acknowledgement that it is okay and important to fall.
For rain to fall.
For us to fall.
Dancing in the rain is a statement that we are perfectly imperfect, at our most rational when we are held in contradiction. What are we, if not caught between an endless struggle of love and loss, and of yes and no?
Even if your insides are screaming, the loss of a dream is a quiet resistance. The end of a friendship is a quiet unfounding. So all I ask is that you celebrate before you shatter.
I am Ishita Jain and I am experiencing my life as I currently know it begin to fade. I’m graduating. I am to embark somewhere new but I am scared and vulnerable. Not a day goes by when I don’t already feel like I’m in the future, that this is all already over and I’m regretting the things I had not done. And when change strikes again, I will once more be stuck here in this unending space of uncertainty. I am sad, but at the same time I am here and I am happy. I am alive and I am dancing with my words.
So I implore you, to go out and dance even when it is raining, to dance ESPECIALLY when it is raining, to dance under the rain of your tears until you shimmer with reconstructed hope and are quenched in melancholic cheer.
