There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything. - Hagakure

I have always loved the rain.  Most of us probably do in an ethereal escapist or maybe masochistic way.  It is when you walk slowly through the pattering puddles that you realize how empty of people the world becomes in the rain and how intimate our planet seems.  Maybe it is just the African in me thirsty for water (although, no African I know would dance in England’s freezing down pours)!  Hagakure widens our experience of rain to any experience.  I liken it to suffering, when we avoid the rain, by driving the car down the road, it becomes something we resent.  Our car interiors get wet and people drive too slowly, then we take flight from car to building, coat off, hair shaken through, we warm our hands on the radiator.  But when we walk through the rain, we notice that it is not always cold – for then it would be snowing – we smell the flowers more clearly, the smog dissipates, every possible surface becomes alive with percussive song, we get soaked, maybe, but we acclimatize.  Upon returning home, we are usually drenched, but alive. 

Have you ever walked into the rain,
With head held high and felt the pain,
Of sky-flung tears that burn your ears
With words of “follow, follow”?

The world wraps around and blunts and blurs
All sense of perspective,
You tread the earth and feel connected
When you walk into the rain.

It’s always raining somewhere,
so stop complaining will you?

- Have You Ever, a song by A. Jell

Suffering is just like this, maybe.  And suffering is just part of life.  To be resolved in suffering is to journey this way or that way through life, accepting both good and bad consequences of our chosen routes.  Recognizing consequence and, even further, taking responsibility for our actions are a long step away from a simple and painful starting point; freedom. 

"The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the... people - a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people." - Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, The Souls of Black Folk

We were all slaves, and will continue to choose slavery when we think we choose Freedom. We are looking for our promised land, and freedom is a dangerous and disappointing journey, ending in affirmation and regret, joy and pain.

"Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude." - the Bar Kays.

Freedom is personal, like the narrow road rather than the broad road of mass-belief.  Freedom must be our own, it cannot be offered by others not bought nor stolen from them.  Freedom is both the problem and peace of society; a multitude of personal choices are bound to contradict and collide.  We start to realize how unequal freedom can be.  But on the other hand, freedom is a state of mind, an internal resolve that only we can let others intrude upon.  Life is in the detail and freedom is in the choices.