It never rains to everyone’s liking. That’s a saying in Spanish. For the past weeks the sun has heated the walls of my flat so much that the very thought of rain flows down my body and triggers cracks in the floor tiles. Water… what an extraordinary happening over this land. When I was a kid this region was going through a historical drought. Mediterranean sky is like a caring mom, sometimes turns the ground into a bowl of mud-oranges soup to smooth our throats. But most of the year it wraps us in layers of woolen sun, and lull us in fever, leaving us somehow drugged.
Raindrops don’t fall as much as I would like, but again, it never rains to everyone’s liking, which means that clouds can’t please everyone... Pleasing. Pleasing is a subjective matter, or it seems so. It has as many ways as there are people beneath the sky. "Please, please me as I please." What a warped line. Sometimes I surprise myself when thinking in this language… but that’s the case for a lot of us. Some children of Adam want to be pleased, others want to please so that they get pleasure back, some of them even try to satisfy others through their own pain… scary, right? Well, moms often do that, also businessmen, teenagers, scholars, clumsy lovers, good souls from everywhere give away their suffering to indulge others, to get some love back, to hear a clap. Why? Isn’t it easier to please oneself, and after that freely please others only when to satisfy is a disinterested action, a real pleasure genuinely coming from inside? What’s wrong with us? Aren't we sent enough difficulties from the sky? Why do we need to complicate life even more? I’m not talking about clouds, pleasing, rain, orange soup, or selfishness, but about that dangerous idea, that concept of sacrifice.
Today I talked with mom about all of this stuff. Not about the rain, because she already knows about that. Guess what she said when I asked her to stop wearing down herself to make everyone happy. She quoted an Elton John line without realizing. “It’s no sacrifice at all.” Yeah, with moms it’s a lost cause.
