If You Don't Care

It's pouring with rain here this morning, and I won't be the first poet, or the last, to make the easy connection between rain and tears.  Indeed, those three words formed the title of a song by the band Aphrodite's Child, the band formed by Vangelis and Demis Roussos in 1968 (the song itself being one of many pop songs based on Pachelbel's Canon).  The opening words :-

Rain and tears are the same,
but in the sun you've got to play the game.
When you cry in winter time
you can pretend it's nothing but the rain.

It is perhaps easier to hide one's sadness in the winter, not least because in the shorter days and colder conditions we're out and about less, and keep ourselves to ourselves more.  But for many people there is a huge weight of sadness and solitariness that remains unattended-to, through the long dark evenings.  The bright hustle that leads up to Christmas and the New Year celebrations provides some antidote to this, but then the great dark cold waste of January stretches ahead, and there'll be many of us wondering how we shall manage to get through it.

I was touched to receive a Christmas card which included a short message of thanks for being a sympathetic ear and shoulder at the right time . . . not least because I didn't think I'd done all that much.  It is a very natural thing to care for each other, and to feel sad about the sadness of others, but it's also quite natural, and all too easy, to be so caught up in ourselves that we don't do much - enough - about those feelings.  To quote from the Deacon Blue song 'Loaded' :-

I have found an answer, I don’t think you don’t care -

just you laugh ’cause you’re loaded, and things are different from there . . .

I suppose it's time for me to think seriously about New Year resolutions, and a good starting point could well be that I should care not just in theory but in down to earth practical ways, for those who need me to care.  I can't feel smug about the message in that card;  I'm glad I was able to offer something, but I am also all too aware of the times when I've not been there, caring and consoling and supporting, for family or friends or neighbours.  None of us can do everything, and we're not going to be able to turn back the winter or stop the rain from falling - but I am sure we can all do more than we do, and enough to make a positive difference.