A few months ago, I was driving to work in typical fashion. It’s early in the morning, my iPod is playing, I’m wishing I were still in bed…and it’s raining. It wasn’t so long ago that rain was a novelty to me. I grew up in the arid plains of west Texas, and the only “greenery” you will see is at traffic lights and on John Deere tractors. However, I was living in Houston at the time, where rain is a fairly common occurrence.

Some people freak out when it rains. They think that at any moment a rushing wall of water is going to envelop the road on which they are driving, sending them tumbling helplessly toward the Gulf of Mexico and certain death. Or that every other driver on the road is maniacal, and they are all on the verge of simultaneously spinning out of control and creating a massive pile of twisted metal in the middle of the freeway. There is not a large group of otherwise hibernating racecar drivers who descend upon the roads the second it starts raining. This irrational fear is not only unwarranted; it is unhealthy. I’m convinced that, for these people, the combined stress of a 15-minute driving experience in the rain is the equivalent of a minor heart attack. And yet, for all of this worry, there is absolutely nothing that can be done. Not a single second of fretting will change the fact that it is raining; it is absolutely beyond our control.

I, on the other hand, don’t mind the rain. If you are a safe, defensive driver, there is no reason to fear for your life on the road, even in the rain. Most people decrease their speed substantially when it is raining, anyway, so traffic is moving much slower (not that it ever moves fast in Houston). In fact, most people are much more cautious in general during adverse driving conditions, not crazed speed demons. Even if they were, there is nothing that can be done about them on my end. I can’t remotely steer their vehicle to a safe place on the side of the road and disable it until the rain stops. No, all that I can do is operate my vehicle as safely as I know how, and hope that everyone else around me is doing the same.

However, as I was driving to work on this ordinary day, enjoying the rain, my joy turned to perplexity when I saw a landscaped area with it’s sprinkler system turned on. I’m serious. It’s raining hard enough for my windshield wipers to be on “high,” and somebody has the sprinkler system on. What kind of an idiot does that? Is there really any added benefit? What if it floods?

It was at this point that I caught myself. I was worrying about something that was completely beyond my control, and it was just a silly sprinkler system. In reality, there were probably very good intentions behind those sprinklers. I’m sure there is someone who gets paid to make sure that particular piece of landscaping looks good. That person probably has those sprinklers set up on a timer so that they turn on at the same time every morning, for the same amount of time every morning. They might even have it calculated so as to deliver the perfect amount of water for maximum benefit of the landscaping in question. Perhaps they just forgot to check the weather the night before, and therefore didn’t get the memo to turn off the sprinkler timer for the following morning. Maybe that person was just making the best plans possible for what he or she thought was going to happen.

There will always be things to worry about, and there is really nothing that your worrying will change. In fact, worrying is probably only going to make things worse. So don’t worry or fret. Just know that there are so many things in this life that are beyond our control, that to freak out about them all of the time is nothing but an exercise in futility. So futile that it could cause you to miss out on the beauty that is all around you. So slow down, take a deep breath, and remember that you will never have another chance to enjoy today.

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