Complaining about the weather is an all-season national pastime

It has become clear to me that we may be suffering from a peculiar cyclical amnesia that comes with the change of seasons. To my knowledge, no warning of  this malady has  hit  the desk of the  Secretary of Health and Human Services, therefore no vaccine is available.

I mean, really – every winter we forget the sweltering heat of summer; every summer we retreat to air-conditioned space we forget the bone chill of January. Some folks  retreat to warmer climates  in the winter months, yet they still complain of the less than perfect  weather.

We complain about the melting snow or melting ice cream,  sunburn or frostbite. Our collective forgetfulness is almost comical. Right? Here is a familiar scenario:  It’s March and the sun has finally decided to show her face. We walk through the winters last bit of slush complaining about the cold. We glare at the sky as if it personally insulted us. We tell everyone that we can’t wait for summer. We may even make lists of the fun-things we will do.

The calendar is finally season friendly. Are we happy? With water bottles tethered to our hand, (some can be thirty-two ounces) and sweat running down our backs we become exhausted. I am no exception. In early June,  the temperature hit the 100-degree mark for several uncomfortable days. I was hiding indoors from the heat dome, as the meteorologists called it. I wished that the weather could just be nice. The weather gods heard me! And just like that the temperature dropped to 68 degrees. I put on a sweater.

Like baseball, dissatisfaction about the weather is a national pastime. We can’t help ourselves. In the winter we complain about the cost of heating, vaccines, and the flu. In summer we complain about the cost of running our air conditioners. We swat at mosquitos and pray that the little critters  are not carriers of a dread disease.

We seem almost comforted by this ritual of shared complaints, despite the relentless grumbling. Perhaps,  it’s less about the weather itself and more about the camaraderie of communal grumbling. It’s an easy conversational entry point. I have a friend in Missouri who sends me daily  weather reports which prompts me to  do the same.

Maybe grumbling about the weather is a kind of social glue. We commiserate  with each other while in a  doctor’s waiting room or in a check out line:  “Hot enough for you,   can you believe this rain,  or they  are predicting eight feet  of snow.”    We may come from diverse backgrounds and facing different personal issues, yet  we are enduring the same sweltering heat or bone chilling cold together.

On the other hand, why can’t we humans just enjoy the weather as it is? Perhaps the question should be, why can’t  we humans live in the moment? Maybe,  we treat the weather as we treat our lives:  Always yearning for something just out of reach—convinced that our happiness is waiting  after our next  promotion, when our financial condition improves, when we retire, or after the next forecast.

We live in the eternal now. Our lives are happening now. We wait for a change of weather or …(fill in the blank) as though that holds the key to our contentment, while the present slips quietly past, unnoticed. The present  will become the past—the real tragedy lies in those unnoticed moments that will never become memories.

As a medical professional and a lay eucharistic visitor for my church I have sat with folks who were transitioning from this world to the next. During those sacred last conversations, the weather was never brought up.

Just maybe, our weather woes are a gentle nudge to savor the fleeting moments between the extremes: the first mild breeze after a heatwave, the golden light of autumn, the crispness of an unexpected spring morning. If we could only remember to notice these small gifts, our conversations with each other would shift—if only for a moment—from complaints to gratitude.