Shall We Talk About the Weather?

One of the most common conversation starters with a stranger. A comment about the heat to the cashier. A telephone call with a friend in another city that inevitably begins with, “What’s the weather like there?”

Why are we so obsessed with the weather?

We could be anthropological about it and say it is because our ancestors quite literally lived or died by the weather. Rain meant food. Cold meant survival. A storm could change everything.

We could be medical and consider what weather does to our skin, our sinuses, our joints and our sleep.

We could be social. Weddings, parties, what we wear, where we gather and whether the table is set beneath the trees or hastily moved inside.

We could be athletic. Anyone who has ever ridden a horse, swung a golf club, played a chukker, run a race or simply attempted a long walk on an August afternoon knows that weather is never merely background scenery.

And we could certainly be emotional.

A brilliant blue morning can make the world seem full of possibility. Three days of rain can make us restless. The first cool evening after a long summer can make us inexplicably happy.

But really, I think it is all of this and none of this.

Our time on this beautiful big blue marble is limited. The days speed by at an ever faster pace, while the earth keeps turning and the atmosphere keeps moving above us, creating something different every single day.

And perhaps that is where our fascination really begins.

The same rain falling across the fields at Stags Head may be falling on someone hurrying down a city sidewalk and on a schoolchild staring through a classroom window.

Three completely different lives.

One rainy Tuesday.

There is something rather extraordinary about that.

Before Instagram. Before coffee. Before deciding what to wear or opening the laptop or beginning another day of dealing with the world, there is the weather.

We look outside.

We notice.

And humans have been doing exactly that for thousands and thousands of years.

Before politics, professions, money and social media—before almost everything that now separates and defines us—we looked at the sky.

Perhaps that is why we talk about the weather.

It isn't because we have nothing more interesting to say. Quite the opposite.

Weather reaches something at the very core of us—the part that remembers, somewhere deep down, that we belong to this earth and to one another.

The core of us that ties us to the core of each other.

We stand beneath the same sky.

So perhaps talking about the weather was never small talk at all.

Perhaps it is our simplest way of saying:

I'm here.

You're here.

Look at the day we've been given.