the weather.

This morning I woke up with a splitting headache and I immediately knew why.

You see on Thursday it was close to 80 here, which is ridiculous because this is Maryland and it's November. It shouldn't be close to 80 in November here. But it was.

During the night, the temperature had plummeted over 20 degrees.

This isn't an unheard of or wildly unreasonable drop in temperature for a single night. But when you have a lingering cold and bad seasonal allergies, it is a recipe for a sinus headache.

Which is precisely what I woke up to.

Photo taken from the window of my apartment in law school.

As part of my work, I frequently review people's medical records. And frequently they mention to their doctors that their pain worsens with changes in the weather.

It's not just these patients. In the aftermath of two knee surgeries, my sister has frequently complained of increased knee pain when it rains or gets too cold. My mother stretches her fingers under the same conditions, clutching and releasing them in the hopes of relieving pain brought on by arthritis.

The simple truth is that there are still some things we can't control. We can't control the weather. Even if the conspiracy theorists are right and we can control the weather, we can't control how our bodies react to it.

All the Advil in the world won't alleviate this headache of mine because all of the Advil in the world can't relieve the pressure on my sinuses. That pressure is out of my control.

Even our own bodies are frequently outside of our own control. We can explain a lot of why our bodies do what they do. But we can't explain everything.

And if you ask me, that's a beautiful thing, a freeing thing.

Instead of expending the energy and resources it takes to control a thing, we can relax and put that energy and those resources to better use elsewhere.

I don't know about you but I certainly have enough to worry about without trying to control everything.

If you try and control everything you'll collapse in on yourself like a star, creating a black hole that just sucks in everything that comes close to it without changing its state or giving anything back to its environment.

Nobody wants to be a black hole, to be a drain on those around you, to remain constantly in the exact same state of decay and stress, never moving forwards or backwards.

Even Ron Swanson eventually wanted to move forward.

So why not find joy in the fact that some things are out of our control? Why not look at those things in appreciation for the freedom that they give you?

You'll drive yourself crazy if you don't.