Colorado has been hard hit by massive rains daily for what seems like months now. I hadn’t ridden my Harley in about 6 weeks and wanted to experience that again. Despite some threatening rain clouds, I took the risk, and had a great time riding my bike around town in Denver. Then I had to run to an appointment in Boulder about 30 miles away. During the way I ran into an intense squall, a massive rainstorm with a tiny bit of hail. I was wearing suede loafers, jeans, a t-shirt, very light fleece jacket and a helmet.
The rain was intense. Typically this would have produce intense negative feelings in me, I had the joy of riding about 1000 miles in rain on a past motorcycle trip and I’m intensely familiar with all the mood drenching aspects of that. However, today, I wanted to really experiment with sustaining my positive mindset. First I remembered Churchill’s famous quote of “if you’re going through hell, keep going”. I couldn’t help but smile at my own wit as I changed that to “if you’re riding through a massive rain storm, keep going”.
Next I noticed that there was a sun overhead and to the left. It was more than the sun, it was a gorgeous spectacle of a hole in the clouds with the sun beaming through, and another hole below it, in the shape of an upside down heart, illuminated from beyond, with the pointed tip pointing at the sun above. It was mesmerizing, it was beautiful, and it put goosebumps on my arms. I allowed myself to drink that in as much as possible while still attending to traffic and reveled in the joy of seeing a spectacular demonstration of nature that I’ not sure how many other people were aware of at the same time. Less than 7 minutes later, I was through the squall and actually amazed.
By focusing on the beautiful, on how lucky I was, on the beautiful, divine spectacle of nature, I had surprisingly gotten through the rainstorm much better than I would have expected. My fleece somehow kept itself dry (go Marmot!), my jeans were soaked below the knee, but not really, another 10 miles of 60 mph riding and they were almost dry again. My shoes had a beautiful, symmetric pattern on them, part was wet, part dry, yet my feet felt comfortable and dry enough and again, soon even the detractions from perfect no longer mattered.
My positive mindset had turned my rainstorm ride into a minor miracle, a beautiful experience around a vision of the sun that I wouldn’t have experienced if there hadn’t been the rain, and if I hadn’t been out in it.
The Awesomeness Project is teaching me the beauty in the items I generally would have described as minor setbacks. It is teaching me that my labelling, my description of something as good or bad hasn’t always contributed to the awesomeness of my past life, and that I can change that and live a more awesome life.
Come join me in that!