Weather and the Climate
On knowing the difference between what’s passing through and what needs to change
The spring here in Chicago has been different this year.
Last Thursday, we traversed every season in a single day. A cool but warm morning gave way to torrential downpours with lightning and thunder, then broke into sun, then dropped twenty degrees into a dense fog that settled in and stayed overnight.
It was confusing. It was beautiful. It constantly changed.
We often judge the weather of our lives as though it were the climate, as though every storm is a permanent condition, every difficult season a forecast for what’s ahead.
When something feels off or wrong, it’s worth pausing for just a moment. Your body already knows the difference. It will tell you, if you let it.
If it’s weather, sit tight. It will pass.
If it’s climate, and it is no longer yours to grow in, it may be time to move. You cannot cultivate lush fields in a desert, nor coax the arctic into the tropics. You cannot grow roots in a soil that doesn’t nurture who you are, or who you are becoming. Some environments were simply never built to hold you.
Here is where it gets tender: most of us were never taught how to simply sit inside a storm. We were taught to react to it, fix it, escape it, or collapse beneath it. So when the flood comes, we don’t just get wet, we begin to believe we are drowning. When the drought comes, we don’t just feel thirsty, we begin to believe we will never know water again. We catastrophize. We dramatize. We wallow in the rising water long after it’s already begun to recede.
The flood can leave real damage. The drought brings a real thirst. Those things are true and worth honoring. The storm was real. What you felt inside it was real.
The question worth sitting with is this: who are you when it passes?
Because it does pass. It always has. The fog lifts. The temperature steadies. The sun finds its way back through. The version of you that catastrophized, that wailed, that was certain this time was surely the end, that version also survives. The question is whether you let the storm write the story of who you are, or whether you remain, after all of it, the person the storm could not unmake.
There is one more thing worth naming. Every climate suits someone. What is paradise for one person is uninhabitable for another, and both of those things can be true at the same time with no conflict between them.
My husband is a water baby and a sun worshipper, happiest when the heat is high and the light is full. I can enjoy the warmth too, but I need my sunscreen, my shade, and a fan nearby. We can be in the same place and experience it entirely differently. Neither of us is wrong. We just know what we need to thrive, and we don’t pretend otherwise.
Neither one of us would ever last as desert survivalists. We would be more than happy in the jungles of Costa Rica. That is the climate for me, for us, for now.
The point is this: just because a climate suits the people around you does not mean it suits you. There is no obligation to perform comfort in conditions that cost you. Noticing what you actually need, and honoring it, is not ingratitude. It is self-knowledge. It is the beginning of finding your way toward the right soil.
I wish I had this language earlier in my life. The wisdom to feel the difference between a passing storm and a place I had simply outgrown. Looking back now, I wouldn’t be who I am without trekking through those climates, those storms, those long-awaited moments of relief. Every one of them carried me forward, even the ones I was certain would finish me.
What I’ve also learned is that navigating all of it is less about being prepared for every possibility and more about being resourceful in the moment. Willing to ask for help, for direction, for the tools necessary for the terrain you’re actually in. A good umbrella works just as well against the sun as it does against the rain. The tools that helped you survive one season will often serve you in the next, if you’re open to using them differently.
In just a few weeks, I’ll begin another cycle around the sun. The weather here will keep doing what Chicago weather does. What I know now, in a way I couldn’t have known before, is that I’ve finally found the climate where I can thrive.
Think about the last storm you moved through. Did you know, in the middle of it, that it would pass? Who were you on the other side of it that you couldn’t have been before? Is the climate you’re in right now yours, or are you performing comfort in conditions that were never created for you?
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