Into every life some rain must fall. This is one of those white-people idioms that has baffled me until I looked it up very recently. Earlier, I used to wonder, “Wait, does that mean something good or something bad?” Because I’ve never heard a bad-rain-is-coming song in my life. And in the white-people books it meant something bad.

Now that I know what it means, I have been thinking about it. I had a difficult situation at work a few years ago. It consumed me. I consumed it. I couldn’t think about anything else. Months after that situation changed, it still made me seethe and cry and talk in that Ancient-Mariner-catching-someone’s-collar way to anyone who I thought would actually help me sort it out or even understand how insane it made me feel. At some point a friend said to me, “That sounds like it was terribly painful. But you know, if it wasn’t that horrible thing happening right then, it would have been something else at another time.” I screeched to a halt in the same way I had when I was 18 and a friend said to me, “what if you never meet someone you love.” Back then I was just speechless. I’d thought if I’d put in my time like a bureaucrat I’d automatically get a promotion in the Romance Department. I was appalled at the idea that some people just never find love because that’s life and that’s also statistically sound.

But that was when I was 18. Shouldn’t I have been more prepared to hear that every life will have its share of difficulties? No. Apparently, I thought if I actually set my alarm, woke up in the morning and went at it every day, then my life would be warm and smooth like a just-ironed shirt.

The idea that unhappiness, loss and difficulties were not something I could control by just working at it. What a staggering thought! Staggering as in, it made my knees shake and the world tilt and I needed to sit down. Like many other people of my political persuasion, I believed that big structural injustices make it difficult for many individuals and communities to succeed in the material world and even to find happiness. I believed that we all have our parts to play in changing the world (and yes, I can’t even type that phrase without finishing it with lyrics from a Michael Jackson song). I laugh at the self-made, entrepreneur-type fairytale. But in my own case, for some reason, I believed that I was in charge of my own happiness.

It took me a while to recover and reconfigure. I am still at it. On most days, I was used to feeling grateful for the good things that happened. Not getting hit by a car while crossing the road figures often on my daily gratitude list. I was also a chronic fixer of irritations. I have lists — like most of us do — of the leaky tap and the broken chair. But I also constantly wanted to fix the metaphorical leaky taps and broken chairs. How can I undo this lifetime habit? How was I also to separate things that can’t be fixed from things that can?

At these times I wish I was religious. I seem to have missed that boat, but it seems nice to be able to think that something out there has a bird’s-eye of your life or that there is meaning in the chaos. Instead there is interminable to-do lists and shouting, pop-eyed men on television and in our families.

So without special assistance from God and blueprints thereof, it has taken a while to think about this.

Psychologists apparently have a useful term for my dilemma. Locus of control. People who think that they are in control of decisions and events in their lives have an internal locus of control. People who think of fate and luck as being important have an external locus of control. Is one necessarily better than the other? Apparently not. People who have an overly strong internal locus of control may give themselves too much credit for good things that have happened and blame themselves too much for anything going wrong. People who have an overly strong external locus of control may be miserable and unable to deal with unhappy events. You should be balanced in your locus (loci?) of control, the shrinks advise (thanks, shrinks!). Finding that balance may be the task on top of my to-do list for a long time.

In the meanwhile I remind myself that we can freely reinterpret these white-people idioms. Into every life some rain must fall, and what a wonderful thing rain is.

Nisha Susan is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger. @chasingiamb

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