In the high desert just east of Pikes Peak, it only ever rains for ten or twenty minutes at a time.
I grew up there, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This plain east of the Rockies is described as a “high desert,” because it’s very dry. It does, however, consistently get thunderstorms in late summer. These storms range from prolonged, soft, rumbling sessions to exchanges of close and intense barks splitting downpours of hail.
During the more quiet and distant storms, when our house wasn’t being touched by the rain, my dad loved to stand on the deck and watch the lightning. This is a distinct feature of my memory. My dad would go out onto the deck and quietly watch the storm and my brothers and I would join him, satisfied by the awe and tranquility of the storm-proximate atmosphere. We could see the flashes in the dark gray way out on the sky. It was a break in the typical flow of life; my brothers and my dad and I, not speaking, not watching TV or playing video games, only quiet and observant and happy to be together.
When we got one of those roaring hailstorms, my brothers and I would take off our shirts, put on our swim trunks and bicycle helmets, and run around outside shouting. The street would overflow with rushing rain, and the gutters on the house would pour out hail like waterfalls. There was of course the sound, too, so loud, much louder than rainfall, and louder still when it was crashing into your bicycle helmet. And there was of course too the pain of the hail hitting your skin. These were respectably sized pieces of hail, and there was a lot of it. It was notorious for denting cars, ruining shingles, and breaking windows. It hit you on your bare shoulders, chest, and arms , and you could feel it. We would look at each other, all feeling the cold bombardment, and laugh and shout.
One of the colleges I applied to in my senior year of high school was the United States Air Force Academy, which sits up there in the forest at the foot of the mountains, just north of Colorado Springs.
The application process for the USAFA is a little different from most schools. In addition to the usual forms and essays and letters of recommendation, you also need nomination from a member of the US congress. You get this by signing up for an interview with a panel appointed by a congressperson (you don’t ever meet the actual congressperson). Another requirement was a set of pretty high standards on a physical examination, which included push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, a basketball throw (? you just throw a basketball as far as you can), shuttle runs, and a mile run on the track.
I took my training for the physical exam pretty seriously—I installed a pull up bar on my bedroom door, and did pull-ups every time I entered my room. I did push-ups and sit-ups every morning. And I ran. In the month or two leading up to my exam, I ran every night. I ran along Antelope Ridge, a high road on the eastern side of Colorado Springs, which looks out endlessly into the line where the high desert meets the sky. Quite often during my evening runs, there would be one of our thunderstorms visible way out over the horizon. I would watch it the whole time I was running—attentive and relaxed, just like I’d be on the deck.
Sometimes the thunder would be close and it would shake the earth and charge my blood. Sometimes the rain would be falling right on top of me as I ran, and the water would cool my skin and give me chills, and the whole experience would be saturated with reflection and meaning; I was running, bathing in the rain and the thunder, bathing in this grand context.
(I was not accepted. I had the congressional nomination and excellent grades and test scores, and my mile time was better than the standard for the exam, but I was sub-standard in every other physical category. My basketball throw was embarrassingly bad.)
The permanent characteristic of the rain in Colorado Springs — whether it was simple rain, a heavy thunderstorm, or a relentless hailstorm — was its transience. We didn’t have rainy days in Colorado Springs, only sunny days where it rained for ten or twenty minutes.
But I loved the rain. I relished it. So I developed a capacity to pay attention to it while it was happening, a capacity that I could not or would not deploy against any other experience. It was a strained attention, enjoyment mixed with longing and anxiety, because I knew as soon as the rain started that it would be over soon. When it rained, I longed for the present moment.
It seems like an odd thing to say, longing for the present, because the present seems like the only thing we’re actually capable of grasping, the only thing we should never have to long for—the thing that’s in our fingers right now. But this is only because it’s a longing that we don’t typically develop a capacity to feel. We only develop a capacity to feel longing for the other things, for the future, or for the past, or for whatever else we can’t have right now. We do this because this type of longing is easier to feel. We’re more comfortable with it. We’re okay with the idea that we long for something that we don’t currently have (even okayer if it’s something we can exert agency to obtain). We’re not so okay with the idea that we long for something that’s already available to us, or in our hands right now (a cup of coffee, our favorite sweatshirt, the touch of our spouse), and it’s only because our lack of capacity that we are unable to quiet the longing.
The rain taught me to long for the present. It was an impure longing. A bitter mindfulness, a contracted meditation. It was only a difference between my experience during the rain and the rest of my experience, and a difference I only noticed after years of opportunity to notice it. But once I noticed the presence and present-longing, I noticed the difference between presence and unpresence. And I was nearly always unpresent; which is a state of longing to be somewhere else or for the next thing to arrive, or the inability to arrive at the current thing. Waiting—quite literally waiting—for the current thing to be over. And waiting is such an unpleasant thing (would you ever wait in a line just for the fun of it?), but I was subjecting myself to it almost constantly, as if I wanted to be waiting. In fact, I was inventing waiting when there was no waiting necessary: in class, at dinner, during a movie — the experience was there, unlonged for, available for my attention, no waiting necessary, but instead of paying attention I would wait for it to be over.
This is always my condition. An experience is always available for my attention — an experience as rich in sight, sound, and feel as any I could possibly have — and yet I think and act as though there are only a handful of experiences worthy of my attention, and I’m waiting for those ones to come along. In fact, it’s worse than that: I think and act as though only a handful of experiences worthy of my attention, and they can only be recognized after they are in the past. I actively seek out rich and valuable experiences (as if some experiences are more rich than others), on the pretense that I will be valuing the experience as it is being experienced; but in practice, I can observe that the only thing I am capable of doing is waiting for those experiences to be over, too, and cataloging those experiences and attributing meaning to them when I access them later on.
(Or the moment worthy of my attention never comes along.)
This is tragic, but it’s worse than that still, because this intention to attribute meaning and significance to events after the fact doesn’t materialize. I don’t seem to be able to encode these rich/valuable/meaningful experiences with any more detail or valence than the mundane, everyday experiences. I go on a hike in pursuit of a beautiful experience, I recognize the beauty when I see it, I form an intention to remember and ascribe meaning to this experience; but then I wait for it to be over, I get home, and a few days later, the hike exists with no greater significance or fullness in my mind than the thought that I have to go to the gym or the problem of what I am going to make for dinner tonight or the memory of what I was working on earlier in the day.
The spell of the rain has worn off. When it rains, although I still live in the Colorado high desert, I don’t experience the same automatic present-longing. I’m too aware of it, now, I anticipate it, and this anticipation precludes the longing. The experience cannot be created through my own effort. But the tragedy, really, is not my failure to experience rich and meaningful events (whether they are rain or hikes or Christmas days), and it’s not my failure to encode important experiences with meaning — it’s my failure to recognize the richness of every experience, as it happens; to stop waiting.