Stormwater

Today is one of those days where everything seems just a little bit off –
I have a lot of “should have’s” in my head – Yesterday I should have gone to yoga instead of … I should have gone to bed when I got back from dropping off laundry instead of…. I should have not done this and that and this again …. And today – I should have looked that over again…. I should have paid more attention here …. I should have washed out my coffee cup last night so I didn’t get a mouthful of week old dregs …. Etc.

There is a lot in my mind. I feel as if I have plans and goals for the future that have finally clicked, that make sense and inspire me. I was thinking yesterday about how if you want to be successful in anything, it must be your passion. What is my passion? Do I even have one? The answer “the environment” is nonspecific, and even that does not inspire an upwelling to act, it does not move me to long speeches at a bar or a street corner, it is a category. In my caffeine-induced searches yesterday I came upon a graduate program that I want to do, and it does not eschew the law school that I do in fact feel is inevitable in my life, it just puts it off a few years until it is more feasible in my mind. Most importantly, this program got me thinking about next year.


anyway, somehow in this thought process I realized that my passion, weirdly, really is stormwater management. It is fascinating, that even with all of our technology and encroachment upon the world, we must still succumb to the ferocity of nature’s passions. As we grow in population we are seeing the effects of our thoughtlessness and our heady insistence that we are powerful enough to ignore the environment that created us by the clear declining of those same resources we relied upon to get to this point. And do we believe that we are in fact, so powerful, that we can keep right on growing beyond the point where these resources no longer exist, that we have effectually outgrown our maker? We are teenagers in this world, fighting against our own good, insisting on our independence and not yet aware of how deeply indebted and reliant we are upon our increasingly annoying parents. Storms are proof that we are children, that there is still awe and wonder in the simplicity of the place we live, that the rawest of forces still utterly control our world, and that for all of our predicting power and scientific prowess we are utterly incapable of predicting the weather. Stormwater is a chore, a side effect of living our urban lives in an environment, like cleaning. Dust happens, things get dirty, and if we do not clean it up we get sick. Likewise, since we have imposed ourselves on the world, water lands on the ground and if we do not direct it back to where it is supposed to go, we get sick – dead zones happen, fishes die, plants die, etc.

See – I haven’t even scratched the surface of what I feel on the subject. This, my friends, is passion. Am I wrong?