I was driving to the post office over at the beach in a light rain. I found myself thinking, "Wow, bad weather." But then I caught myself immediately and asked, inwardly, "Why is it bad weather? Why isn't it just weather?"

Well, there are some things you can't or don't do when it's raining, I told myself. It's an exclusionary form of weather. But then I saw a guy jogging, his shirt soaked through. But he wasn't running to get out of the rain. He was simply running in the rain.

Ok. Maybe rain isn't bad weather. Maybe it's just weather, like warm sunshine with a light breeze across the water. We may favor one sort of weather to another. But it's all just weather.

"Say that to the people who were in Boston this winter," the voice in my head reminds me. Yeah, some extreme weather requires that we manage our activities better, or even perhaps refrain from a certain range of possibilities, until the weather changes, which it always eventually does.

And as I continued this little mental dialogue, I came to realize how many things we label bad without a really good reason. It is what it is. And that's sometimes a useful thing to say, or think. We adapt. We adjust. And we know that things will change.

How often do we get all worked up with thoughts like "This is awful" when those thoughts are as useless as they are false? I got home and said, "It's raining pretty hard now."

And my wife said, "The new plants really need it. It's great."

And I was glad I had that talk with myself.