Living in Tucson, AZ I don't see a lot of rain. Excluding the monsoon season, which is full of semi-regular torrential downpours, the number of gray days and rain is pretty minimal. Don't get me wrong, I really do like it, but having grown up in the Pacific Northwest I'm pretty used to rainy and gray. So the days in Tucson that are gray and rainy I feel a bit grounded. Thinking about it now, it makes a lot of sense - it's part of who I am. When I lived in the PNW I grew frustrated with the number of baseball games that were rained out, got sick and tired of walking to school and getting wet, and just grew to expect that there would be a little bit of the wet stuff on a regular basis.
I've been back home in Washington for the past couple days and true to form I've seen my fair share of gray days. But, you know what, it's been great. It's what we do up here in the PNW and it just feels right. As I was flying into SEA I could see the clouds and got a little excited. I knew in that moment that when I was here they became second nature, but now that I've been away for some time I kind of forgot what it was really like.
I found some of the same feelings when I went and got a warm Starbucks coffee. I grew up north of Seattle when Starbucks was making it's rise to global coffee dominance. I took for granted every venti irish creme mocha I drank when I lived here. The no longer carry irish creme and I'm still miffed, but that's another story (it's one of the holy grails of coffee flavorings, I'm just saying). I've been to many Starbucks elsewhere (they're everywhere) and the coffee is good. The one I got here in the cold rain of a PNW morning this past tasted just like it was meant to be!!!
Much of that can be said for our daily personal and work life. We grow so used to the daily routine we forget to find or see the things that make us happy and content. The fact of the matter is that it's there all along, but we allow it to get lost in the monotony. We charge along through life and fail to recognize that within every daily ordinary are many of the things we find extrodinary if only they occured in another situation or setting. Those warm fuzzies you get mean something, but you could be experiencing so many more if you just let yourself go home again.
A lot of times we take for granted some of the things that are everyday occurrences in our lives. Going home helped me realize some of that. I have been missing some of the things in my life because I just cast them off as the normal or the routine - but guess what, they are part of who I am.
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