Embrace the Elements – Everyday Adventure #4

Rain water trickles down my sleeve, inside the back of my glove and sends a chill up my forearm. From my experience in the outdoors, wet gloves means cold hands and that’s a bad thing.

Pause to assess the situation.

I’m on my bike and it’s raining hard but I’m only a couple of miles from home. Frost bite ain’t an issue today and all I need from my digits is the crude ability to grip the break levers.

A large puddle lies ahead of me and I swerve – not to avoid it but, instead, to roll straight through the middle of it. It’s raining and I want to have some fun

–

I suspect you’re reading this inside a building. I imagine you have a radiator on somewhere and it wouldn’t surprise me if the windows were closed too. Perhaps you drove to work this morning with the heaters or air conditioning on or walked the few hundred yards to the shops wrapped up in a woolly hat and gloves, or beneath an umbrella in a Gore-tex jacket.

We may not yet have machines that can control the weather but modern life has certainly tamed it. We turn dials, select garments and adapt plans to work around meteorology but in so doing I fear we move ourselves one step further away from the world we inhabit, from nature.

This month, dear readers, I request that you embrace the elements. I ask that the next time you see sunshine you fling open your windows and drink in its rays. I beg humbly that when it rains you cower not beneath your brickwork shelters but instead charge into the downpour and jump into puddles with both feet. Should the temperature plummet, then please, for me, jog around the block in shorts and sandals, feel the icy air fill first your nostrils and then your lungs.

Won’t we get cold?

Shan’t we be soaked through?

…and then what? What is so bad about the cold? What happens after you get wet? Half way up Everest these are bad states to be in. Running through your local streets with a grin on your face, they are not. Better, surely, to feel the cold and feel alive than the opposite?

You will get cold, you will get wet, you will feel the sun’s powerful heat and nature’s almighty wind. Your actions will fly in the face of modern life and that, that, is exactly what we strive for. Withdrawal from the sterile world of modern life and a momentary reconnection with raw, with pure, with wild.

This month, if just for one day, don’t fight the elements. Embrace them.