Wet is wet — and that is all

On walking through rain without importing the storm inside

I thought I’d beaten the weather. It had been hammering down since the crack of dawn, but I spotted a brief dry patch and jumped on it. I grabbed Barney’s lead and set off with the smug optimism of someone who believes they’ve hacked the universe. But before I even reached the end of the drive, the rain returned with a vengeance. Within minutes I was soaked. It ran into my trainers and between my toes like cold teeth. Barney — usually delighted to be out no matter what — gave me a look of pure disbelief.

The rain was unavoidable — the self-criticism was not.

There is a past version of me who would have unravelled right there. The script in my head would have been: Of course I mistimed it. Of course I got it wrong. This is how today is going to go — badly. Why can’t I even pick the right moment to walk the dog in the dry? That voice used to feel factual — as though catastrophising was just being realistic.

But this time something quieter showed up. I still felt the irritation — the internal “oh come on, really?” was definitely there — but I didn’t spiral. I didn’t make the weather a referendum on my competence or my worth. I just half-smiled at the timing and thought, almost kindly, well… there it is then. Wet is wet. This is not a moral failure.

By the time we reached the field, the rain had turned bitter — biting into me, soaking through my jeans, sticking to my legs. It was thoroughly unpleasant — not just conceptually unpleasant, but physically, immediately unpleasant. And even there I noticed the absence of that second layer of self-attack. The rain was enough; I didn’t need to add humiliation or shame or funk. I just kept walking — cold, but okay.

When we got home my jeans could have been wrung out. Even Barney shook himself as if he wanted to forget the whole ordeal. I peeled off my wet layers and ran a deep hot bath. Not in a grim survivalist way, but with intention. Bergamot bubbles rising, door shut, steam climbing. The bath felt like medicine and a gift — not a reward for performing well, but a gentle act of repair and regard. A way of saying: Yes, that was hard — now come in and be warm again.

This shift is exactly what Kristin Neff describes: self-compassion doesn’t deny difficulty — it simply refuses to add cruelty to it. Pain is inevitable, but punishment is optional. I didn’t pretend I loved the rain or call it a blessing in disguise. I just stopped narrating it as evidence that I am failing. And that is new.

Kate Bowler’s writing has helped me here too. She refuses to wait for life to arrange itself into neat sense before she makes space for gentleness. She writes from the hard places — the places where life is profoundly unfair — and still insists that goodness and grace can live there without things needing to be fixed first. Standing dripping in the doorway I could feel both lines at once: This is miserable and This is actually okay. They can coexist without cancelling each other out.

There was a time when I believed kindness to myself was weakness or self-indulgence — that if I allowed softness, I would slide into apathy. But here is the quiet proof: I did the cold, wet, necessary thing without bullying myself through it. And afterward,s I didn’t need to deprive myself to stay “disciplined.” I could walk the storm — and then run the bath. Strength and kindness are not opposites. They are sequential.

I’m starting to believe the win isn’t staying dry or predicting the weather. The win is refusing to turn ordinary difficulty into self-contempt. The win is doing what must be done without narrating it as a personal failure. The win is emerging cold but undramatic — and then letting the warmth back in.

Life will keep sending us unpleasant weather in one form or another. We don’t get to choose that. But we can choose not to break our own hearts over things that are already hard. Maybe that’s the work — not clearing the storm, but refusing to let the weather outside become the weather inside.