learning from the storm

... and not fighting the weather.

For a long time, I thought the purpose of suffering was to understand it: you look at it, you describe it, you analyse it, you compare it, you talk about it [endlessly...], and you change, you do something, you move, you develop.

Whenever life became difficult, my instinct was always the same: make sense of it, find the lesson, work harder, think harder, search for the hidden meaning that would somehow justify the pain. I believed that if only I could understand the storm well enough, I might eventually discover how to stop it.

Lately, however, I have begun to wonder whether I have been asking the wrong question.

This reflection began with something that has become increasingly important in my work: learning directly from nature rather than merely using nature as a metaphor.

There is a difference. Nature is not simply a convenient illustration for human psychology. Nature has been navigating uncertainty, disturbance, adaptation and renewal for billions of years. If we pay attention, perhaps it has something to teach us.

Looking back over my own life, I noticed something curious: every major crisis seemed to arrive in clusters. Earthquakes and floods, panic attacks and broken relationships, car and motorbike accidents, financial collapse and loss of jobs, migration and Brexit, illness and falls, uncertainty, family crises, birth and adoptive mothers. Each period arriving like clockwork every 9.5-10 years felt overwhelming while I was living through it, and I think [hope] I am seeing now the end of the last one. Every time I looked for something sturdy, reliable, accountable, and solid to stand on. A guarantee. And never found it.

Yet something else happened every single time: after each period of disruption came movement.

After one crisis, I left home.

After another, I moved country.

After another, I built a profession.

After another, I returned to university.

After another, I discovered art.

Then came my MRes. Now my PhD.

Looking back, I realised that each crisis was followed by a greater degree of differentiation. I became more myself. Not because suffering is somehow noble. Not because pain is desirable because I personally cannot stand the cheap moral explanation that we "need" to suffer.

But because each rupture gradually separated me from lives that were not truly mine.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I stood more upright. For years I often described myself as being lost, on all fours, engulfed by the undergrowth. My horizon is a few inches away. Everything is immediate. Everything is tangled. Unable to see the Stag.

That undergrowth had not disappeared: I had simply changed my perspective. It took me years to learn to sit and then to stand up. And standing upright allowed me to notice something that had always been there: the bow on my back, the arrows in my quiver, and the Stag waiting further ahead.

The landscape had not changed. I had.

Yesterday, another thought emerged: perhaps the lesson of the storm is not to understand the weather.

Perhaps it is to learn how to sail.

For years, I found myself angry at God, angry at fate, angry at life itself. When the fear and panic arrive, when the undergrowth becomes so dense that you are trapped and stuck, I felt I could not move and that there was nothing I could have done to ease myself; nothing that any other person could have done to help me; and that even God did not show up to free me. Actually, it felt the opposite: you feel you don't have enough money? Let's add some clients who cancel on you. You feel you need peace and silence? Let's have your neighbours have a weekend-long party. You need to submit something for your studies? Let's have your keyboard die on you in the middle of the night. It felt [and feels] like an aggressive persecution.

Why doesn't the storm stop?

Why doesn't someone intervene?

Why isn't there a miracle?

But then a memory from sailing returned: when a real storm arrives, experienced sailors do not prove their courage by raising every sail to get out of it quickly, quite the opposite, actually. They reduce sail. In Italian, we call the mainsail randa. In heavy weather, it is reduced to the smallest amount necessary to keep the boat balanced and moving safely through the waves.

The objective is no longer speed nor going back into harbour, but staying outside, and letting it pass. You preserve the boat. It is survival. The storm is not the moment to fight the sea. It is the moment to work with it.

Suddenly, something shifted inside me yesterday.

Perhaps I have spent decades trying to master the weather, trying to understand every current, every wave, every cloud, every gust of wind. Trying to solve life while standing in the middle of the storm.

But nature does not operate like that.

A storm is not an accusation.

A drought is not a judgment.

A tree that grows crooked is not being punished.

The wind does not have an opinion about the tree.

The sea does not reject the sailor.

The wave does not say: "This particular boat annoys me today."

But what if analysing and solving have never been my task?

What if the real lesson is much simpler?

Reduce sail + Protect the boat + Keep enough movement to remain upright.

Allow the hull to do what it was designed to do.

Trust that storms, by their very nature, do not last forever.

This does not mean becoming passive.

It does not mean giving up: it means recognising that every season asks for a different way of participating.

Nature never asks an oak to produce leaves in the middle of winter. A fox conserves energy when food is scarce. Seeds remain dormant until conditions allow growth.

Winter is never a failed spring.

None of these is a failure: they are expressions of wisdom.

Perhaps human beings have forgotten that wisdom.

Perhaps we confuse relentless effort with courage.

Perhaps real courage is knowing when to reduce sail.

We all know that a fire is devastating. But ecologists know something fascinating: some forests don't simply recover after fire. Certain species only germinate because of it. The heat opens cones or triggers seeds that otherwise remain dormant. That doesn't mean the fire is good: it means life has evolved ways of responding creatively to devastation.

Looking at my life, I don't think I am someone who becomes who she is because of suffering, but someone who refuses to let suffering have the final word.

One of the deepest realisations for me has been that there are always two forms of pain.

There is the objective pain of what happens.

Then there is the additional suffering created by fighting reality, demanding that the weather be different from what it is.

The first cannot always be avoided. The second, perhaps, can be softened.

Today I am still very tired.

The storm has not entirely passed.

The longing for respite is still present.

But something fundamental has changed: I no longer believe that my task is to command the weather. Maybe my role is to simply wait until it moves through me, to become a better sailor and to respond to Nature's attunement with more of a skilful participation. Maybe, borrowing from Lyanda L Haupt's beautiful book Rooted, my role is to hear the call of Nature and reply: I am here, allowing for the clouds and the rain and the waves to touch my body, for the saltiness of the storm to lick my lips, for me to learn to listen.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest lessons nature has been trying to teach me all along: work with the storm.

onwards + upwards,

mx

ps: you might want to follow me on FB on my new dedicated page, Threading the Wild and have a look at the new series of therapeutic sessions...

#storm #sailing #phenomenology #rooted #paleophenomenology #threadingthewild