When the Sky Forgets Its Manners!

Day 3

Before we called it rain, it was just a sound. A rhythm. A hush. A tap. Before we named it bad weather, it was simply the sky expressing itself. The philosopher Edmund Husserl would urge us to “bracket” all our assumptions—to let go of labels, expectations, even metaphors and just experience the rain. So let’s try.

You’re walking home. It begins—not with thunder, but with that uncanny pause in the air, as if the world has held its breath. Then,drop. Singular, audacious. Then a second, a third and before you can say -umbrella, you’re inside the downpour. But pause here. Don’t run. Don’t curse your luck. Stand still. This isn’t inconvenience—it’s revelation.

Feel it.

Cold, but not cruel. Heavy, but not harsh. The raindrops on your arm aren’t falling on you,they’re meeting you. The water is saying-You’re real. You exist. You’re part of this. For once, the world isn’t asking you to do or prove anything. It’s simply offering an experience.

Your ears become alert to textures. There’s percussion on rooftops, static on leaves, the glug-glug of overworked drains, the squelch of shoes turning traitor. The ordinary becomes orchestral. Even puddles, which seconds ago were problems, now seem like strange, silvery mirrors. Look into one. Is that you? Or the sky remembering itself?

This is what phenomenology invites-not interpretation, not meaning-making—just presence. To encounter each drop as if it were the first drop in history. And when you do that, the world becomes strange again. Alive. Deeply unfamiliar in a familiar way.

A soaked leaf sticks to your ankle—annoying, yes, but also tender. A stranger hands you a tissue and suddenly, the city doesn’t feel so indifferent. In the rain, everyone slows down. We all become participants in something unscheduled, communal, almost sacred.

You notice things like the glint of water on an iron railing, the way damp hair smells like childhood, the way a dog shakes off rain like it’s been betrayed. Even your thoughts feel different,less linear, more liquid. The rain rewrites your inner monologue in a softer ink.

Rain doesn’t demand answers. It simply asks you to show up—unpolished, vulnerable, open. Not as a thinker or a fixer, or even a poet. Just as someone who feels. And isn’t that the beginning of all philosophy?

So the next time it rains, don’t categorize it. Don’t ask whether it’s a good day or bad. Let it fall. On you, in you, around you. Let the world seep back into your senses. Let yourself be reminded,before we mastered the world with words, we belonged to it silently.

Just be there.

In the downpour.

Without labels. Without filters. Without a plan.

Just presence and rain.