A common saying from my home in Southeast Missouri is that if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and it will change. It’s a sentiment born of restlessness — a hope that if we just hold our breath long enough, the current reality will be replaced by something more palatable.

But living here on the island, where the clouds can settle into the moss for weeks at a time, that Missouri logic doesn’t quite hold water (no pun intended). If we spend our time getting angry at the rain, we aren’t just getting wet; we are suffering. We are focusing on the sunshine we think we’re missing rather than the life that is actually happening.

In Buddhist thought, this distinction is often explained through the parable of the “Two Arrows.” The first arrow is the event itself — the rain soaking through your jacket or the wind chilling your bones. That is the manageable pain; it is a physical reality we can dress for or endure.

The second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves: the resentment, the “why today? and the internal “no” we scream at the sky. That is the unmanageable suffering. We can’t control the clouds, but we can stop reaching for that second arrow.

The comedian Pete Holmes often speaks about a “Yes, Thank You” approach to this kind of friction, a concept he frequently ties to the teachings of Richard Rohr. It sounds counterintuitive — why thank the rain when you had outdoor plans?

But saying “yes” isn’t about liking the forecast or being a doormat to circumstance. It is about radical acceptance. It is the realization that “no” creates internal friction and a “bad day,” while “yes” creates space. When we say “yes” to the rain, we stop fighting a battle we were never going to win.

We accept the manageable discomfort of being damp and let go of the unmanageable burden of wishing the world were different than it is.

I have always had a natural perspective on this, even before I discovered my current discipline. Back when I was married, my wife would perpetually stress over things that couldn’t be changed. I would often remind her that her stressing did nothing to fix the situation, and was actually making things more tense for everyone in the house.

From a Christian perspective, Christ said, “be anxious for nothing” and Christians were commended to “count it all joy” when encountering trials and tribulations.

Rohr suggests that these negative situations act as a sanding or buffing process for the soul. If we view the rain — or the broken equipment, or the difficult news at City Hall — as sandpaper, we realize the grit isn’t there to ruin us; it’s there to buff away our sharpest edges. The difference between a good day and a bad day in the community rarely has to do with the barometric pressure.

It has everything to do with whether we are standing in the downpour shaking our fists at the inevitable, or saying, “Yes, thank you” for the reminder that we are part of a world we do not control, being shaped into something smoother by the very things we once tried to wish away.