Being Downwind

Everybody is downwind from time to time.

I live in the Midlands region of England. Yesterday was overcast, but the clouds were not due to ordinary weather. A volcano is spewing ash high into the air in Iceland, upwind from here. On the ground it seemed like just another cloudy day, but I began to cough more and my nose began to plug up.

Today the sky started out sunny, clouded over, then became sunny again. But even when the sun is out and even though my sense of smell is famously unreliable, I can smell the ash now. V felt bad as soon as we got up. I was okay until I walked a couple of blocks to buy groceries. Within minutes, my sinuses hurt, my cough flared up and all the energy drained out of me.

It’s our turn to cope with the effects of being downwind of something bothersome.

Everybody has to take a turn at being downwind or downstream sometimes. The problem isn’t always smoke or ash. It can be floodwaters, too much snow, too much hot dry parching wind…

It can be a housing bust downwind of an excessive frenzy of building. It can be the collapse of the dot com bubble. It can be the ripple effect after a few people in critically important places overreach and bring a house of cards tumbling down not just on their own heads, but on other people’s heads too. Much of the world has been downwind of that for the past couple of years or so, including yours truly.

Being downwind stinks, if you will pardon the pun. But it happens from time to time. Hardly anyone can get through life without ever being downwind of something bothersome. With both the volcanic ash and the economic mess, I think we would all like to see the wind shift sooner rather than later.