Rain

It was raining, it had been raining all week. I was standing just inside the double glass doors that lead into the side entrance of my office building. I stood there watching the world just outside of those windowpanes as the rain fell. I would occasionally take a moment from work to go to this spot to just think and contemplate things… so I wouldn’t altogether lose touch of the world around me as I starred at a computer monitor for ten hours a day.

As I stood there, I noticed a man walking casually in the rain. He caught my eye because he was the only one walking as the puddles of rain gathered around his every step. The man was in his mid-thirties and he carried only a rolled up straw mat beneath his right arm. The man’s white cotton t-shirt was so saturated by the rain that it stuck to the man’s body. It was obvious this man had been in the rain for quite awhile, quite a lifetime. Regardless of the weather, the storm above his head and the bigger storms in his very life, this man still walked with a somewhat sly smile on his face.

As the man walked toward the glass doors he gestured toward me while pointing at an umbrella lying on the sidewalk. I shook my head “no” to deny ownership. The man eagerly bent over to claim the discarded umbrella but as he examined it he quickly realized it no longer functioned, as it should. The man still tossed the lifeless umbrella over his head as the tattered fabric draped over his face without any rigidity.

It was that moment that struck me. It hit me so emotionally that I felt it physically. As he stood there, briefly with a broken, tattered umbrella hanging off his head covering his face with a droopy despair... he didn't walk away immediately. This man took a moment and I wondered as he pondered... what this man was thinking. 

He stood there. The rain fell around him as he stood there. The black remnants of the umbrella barely protected the man from the elements, yet it somehow seemed to ease his suffering in some humble, beautiful way... as he stood there.

The man eventually walked off with an invigorated saunter, as if he just won a prize. I leaned onto the inner railing of the glass door and placed my forehead on the glass pane as I began to feel short of breath. As I forced himself to take deeper breaths to compensate, fog began to accumulate beneath my nose on the glass. 

I began to feel a deep regret, a sorrow in the very deepest fiber of my soul, my heart. This wasn’t the first time I felt like this… quite often I have felt the pain of a suffering world. The moment, regardless of its intensity always seems to fade away as I manage to move on with my life. You see it takes a sensitive person to feel for someone but it takes a courageous person to act on that very feeling. I wasn’t as courageous as I wished I were.

I turned away from the doors and walked slowly down the hallway towards the elevator to my office. The button lit up beneath my finger as I held it there to go up to the third floor. The doors shook open and I looked into my own reflection as the mirrored interior of the elevator waited for me to enter. I stood in the elevator doorway and braced myself with one hand on the left while digging in my pocket for nothing in particular with my right. 

I starred at myself briefly, yet long enough to seem as if I was waiting for a response. I eventually looked downward, entered, spun around to face the elevator doors and pushed 3. Back to work.