It's been raining since New Year's eve.  And our life experience SO color our emotional reactions to things.  We always assume that humans think rationally, but rational thought really goes to problem solving, while life experience and subconscious go to the deeper choice and reaction issues. 

I always liked rain.  However, since 2007, if it rains more than one day I'm deeply uncomfortable and want to start moving everything I own upstairs.   Our town flooded that year.  It took somewhere between six and eight weeks of rain, no just a few days, but my brain doesn't care.  Its the conditions that created a situation which threw my world upside down.  And this was a MINOR flood, nothing like what goes on fairly regularly with the Mississippi river.  My basement flooded out and there was some danger potential, as the breaker box, hot water heater, and furnace were all in that water.  We had to carefully get a pump into it to get the water out without touching any of the water in case it was electrified, and there was a very real potential of fire form a situation like that I understand, but we had a shelter to go to if needed.  So it wasn't a safe situation, but it wasn't imminent danger of drowning like some people have faced. 

But all the loss of the things we had stored, all the cleanup, the worry about the structural safety of our house (especially since the basement stairs broke off and floated freely around down there), and the sheer amount of work after to clean it all up so we could get it professionally bleached (or whatever they put on it) to control the health issues of post flood sewage in the basement (I'm talking storm drains sewage, not the toilet ones).  There was no power for a week, that made cleanup hard.  And the whole town stank like you wouldn't believe.  So while it wasn't as bad as it is for others, it was pretty bad during the event.  And...it only happened once in the time I've lived here, and once when my grandparents moved here the second year I think, but now it colors my thoughts and feelings about the rain.  And it changed the look of my town.  Lost of neighborhoods are gone now, and just grassy fields left where they were.

Rationally, I know it's not a threat to me unless we start hitting the four week mark that I need to start thinking about it.  But the reality is that on that second day of rain, both Nikki and I start checking the river's height on the town page.  We start eyeing what to move upstairs.  Because brains and psyche are NOT rational.

It's a good reminder to myself to stop and remember not to expect rational thought from big issues from people.  It doesn't work that way.  We all think it should, but brains and emotions don't work on rational.  Rational is how to fix the leaking faucet, how to move the possessions out of the way of the flood.  The emotional brain provides the impetus to actually fix that faucet, and when to start moving those things.  And that part isn't rational, it's deeper in that rooted in a series of complex instinctive and learned behaviors related to survival.  Our brains haven't cuaght up with the modern world, and they still function on survival instinct every day.   That is where the fear of unknown and different comes from. 

It's why change is slow, and not fast.  Because we have to train our brains that those feelings aren't actually helping us survive or function better as a group.  Patience is they key.  It's not about rational thought and statistics, it's about countering that deep emotional instinct and life experience part to effect real change.