Every second of the day, winter continues to close in on Oregon. And if it’s winter in Portland, that can only mean one thing: rain. Oregon rain is not an orchestral monsoon that washes everything clean, leaving a pure blue sky in its wake and a road glistening like honey. It’s a lifeless drizzle, set against a merciless swath of grey sky. It makes you feel like you’re in London, but with fewer fish and chips. Oregon rain is a hulking beast that can kill the spirit for eight months of the year.

But what does the rain tell you? Is the rain depressed because it’s raining? No. It simply falls. Humans see events and weave explanations into a latticework of trauma, insecurity, and fear. Rain becomes the calling card of a bad day. We see our lives through the stories we tell ourselves.

What if we observed the world without the story? If there is no story, we can finally see reality for what it is. Giving up the story about a bad day, we leave space to experience without preconceptions. Details in our environment come to life. This makes us enjoy our day, and that’s how you reverse a bad day.

If you don’t want the world to be one way or another, the present moment bursts with gifts. Watching a raindrop trickle down a pane of glass thick with condensation is a miracle. Feeling the smooth wood on your writing desk is a miracle. Tasting a fresh strawberry–or even one grown in an Icelandic hothouse in the middle of January–is a miracle. We live as if these things are ordinary. Observe the orange as you bring it from your fruit basket to the cutting board. How does it reflect light in the room?

Meditation strips away societal programming: your associations with rain, “good” and “bad” days. These ideas burrow into our minds, affecting how we see the world while blinding us to the ideas themselves. Don’t let ideas run your world without your permission.

Go out in the rain and observe the water on your skin and wind in your face. It might just bring up something different. A more grounded way of thinking. You might just ask yourself, “What was I so scared of?”