The sky parted like an angry muslin curtain being torn open by the crooked hands of Quasimodo and hurled it’s contents at Los Angeles over the past week. Like real live rain. Not “LA rain”, the real thing. It was beautiful at first and then a touch concerning after the tree limbs began to crack off and fall on our front porch, and the roof began to show it’s age with some new ceiling stains and baby leaks along the edges of the 100 year old molding.
As I tended to these little nuisances with some wadded up towels and a couple of phone calls to the roofer, I remembered. I remembered the horror of a few years ago when these torrential rains last appeared in sunny SoCal and my downstairs recording studio/100 year old garage had flooded as well. Oh dear, had the “flooding specialist” who handled that prior catastrophe been worth his salt and guarded us against this new deluge?
I open the swollen pulpy door of the studio as the scent of mildew wafts up my nostrils with arrogance. With the brash confidence of a full house staring at a pair of threes. Each step into the room hesitant and measured as if I were going to sneak up on the situation. Squish… what was that? Yep, wet. The previous work that had been done to stop this from happening did not stop it from happening. It’s not as bad as the first flood but still a flooding nonetheless.
The sense of defeat I felt as I realized this truth was noxious. It pulled the life out of my lungs. “With everything else that’s happening right now, this? Fucking this?” I stood in the middle of the room, feet firmly planted in the mossy carpet. “It’s always gonna be hard like this. Always” My optimistic will lay conquered by leaky room. My sacred space violated by watery interlopers and my work space threatened by their breath. I sulked in a chair for a while, sitting in the spiritual beating I had just taken. And eventually, I started unplugging, cleaning, pulling up the carpet, moving furniture, setting fans, dehumidifiers and moving forward toward recovery. Either you get busy flourishing or you get busy folding. Is there a lot of shit going on right now? Yep. Could I give up, stop and accept this set back? Throw in the towel and let it rot? I could, but I don’t. Especially when things are at their hardest, is when you work even harder. The alternative is giving up and making the present shitty moment a permanent fixture.
When the flood comes, you clean it up and move on. When a flood comes, you scrape and claw your way up the muddy banks to dry land. Keep moving. If you stop moving when a flood comes, you drown. Life’s gonna get hard, guaranteed. Another flood is gonna come, guaranteed. Move or drown. There’s no other choices.
It may suck to keep moving in your “flood” but the alternative is far worse. You don’t have to have a perfect evacuation plan, you just need to stay in motion. The sun comes up everyday and changes everything.
