Petrichor – the smell after rain hits dry ground
From the Greek, Petros, meaning stone, and Ichor, meaning “the fluid that flows from the veins of the gods”
Today my mind goes to this beautiful word, and, inspired by the word, also to how I felt after the rain came and the weather cooled off, which then had me muse on how, over time, we can unconsciously adapt and change to a different environment. Such awareness of the environmental impact on an individual can have value when considered at scale for relationships, families, businesses, organisations, societies.
I live in central London, and this summer has been truly exceptional, hot and dry as never recorded before. In fact, until the early evening of Friday, July 27th it had not rained for around eight weeks. Day after day, week after week went by with the weather replicated.
Hot, dry, sunny. Every day. As it continued week after week it felt like a new normal, as if the weather had ever been this way.
The parks close by became as dry as the African savannah before the monsoons. As my son and I ran in a ParkRun, the dust kicked up by the hundreds of runners seemed like a herd of gazelles (well, that would be him, me perhaps a slight more ponderous beast!) starting out on a run across the veldt!
It almost seemed unnoticeable that the heat began to build even further in the last week or two up to the point where people were cancelling meetings to avoid the heat, avoiding outdoor activities and searching for indoor places with air conditioning. Movie attendant will have skyrocketed.
In fact, for the last two nights before the inventible rain, it was so hot that I slept outside on my roof terrace to stay cool. Somehow this seemed perfectly normal to me. Sleeping outdoors to stay cool, in summer, in London.
Then it rained.
As the rain hit the parched ground, a scent arose, one that is unique to such circumstances.
Petrichor
When the fluid that flows from the veins of the gods meets the hot and dry ground, hardened as stone.
Now, that smell of dry ground after the rain is exquisite. Do google petrichor to understand it more, I’ll simply reflect in my own way.
First, in the famous “summer of 1976” I was 10 years old. We lived in a house with a large garden outside London and it was, as we say in the Caribbean, “dry as chip”. The earth in the garden was cracked like a dry river bed before the rain… and then it rained. Oh, did it rain. Torrents, with steam rising from every surface for hours as the latent heat was unleashed. Oh, and the scent. I can still and always will remember that moment in time, even over the decades.
As humans, as perhaps the only species that can truly self-actualise, our big brains tend to lead us to believe that all we are is our thinking. I’ve come to understand over the past decade or so of study and work around leadership and human behaviour, that we are often even more powerfully influenced by how we feel.
By believing that our thinking is how we understand, learn and control life, we can ignore the power of our feelings, and so our sensations, those stimuli that as the word suggests, come via our senses.
Petrichor is, then about the scent, our sense of smell.
For me, though, I also recognise now that it also marked a sense of relief from the heat.
Whilst I love hot weather (having lived in Cayman for decades!), I am quite heat-sensitive, but had somehow not listened to my body and felt that influence on me as the dry weather went on, and on, and on.
I’d started to sleep less and less due to the heat, and even when I got to the stage where I had to sleep outside, I did not recognise this change in my state of being.
So, the morning before the weather shifted I was having coffee in a pavement café. I was with someone who communicates with a calm clarity and directness that I adore and greatly value, and perhaps a quality in themselves they may not fully recognise as being as exceptional as it is. With their customary clarity, they brought me to an awareness that I had not truly and fully been my normal relaxed and calm self over the past week or two at the height of the heatwave!
I like to think of myself as pretty self-aware, yet in this circumstance, it took the clarity of another to bring that to my attention. I couldn’t see it for myself.
What other dimensions could this story bring meaning to? Where else do we not recognise where our environment impacts us at a level beyond our thinking?
Two come to mind right away.
First, living in the UK, it stuns me to see how the national conversation around Brexit has evolved. More accurately how it has not evolved. The political machinations have gone on, and on, and one now for two years since that epochal vote to leave. To use a weather parallel, thoughts and minds are tired, overheated, stifled. Endless conversations spin around with seemingly no forward progress. I have a sense that those outside the UK look in, aghast, at the way this country is drifting towards economic and even social order chaos, yet nobody is bringing that rain on dry ground to shift the environment and bring fresh and cool air with new thoughts to change the environment and shift things forward with positive momentum.
Second, a general thought around business. We all know the analogy of boiling a frog. You can’t do it by dropping a live frog in boiling water, it would leap away. However, if you let it swim in cool water and gradually, gradually bring it to the boil, the frog would not recognise the gradual change and ultimately be boiled alive. In business, sometimes change is so radical that we can see it. Often, though, we are like the frog, gradually being boiled without realising it. Now, sometimes an external force radically shakes us out of “being boiled” and we act to change. Oftentimes though, and for multiple reasons (fear of being different, risk aversion and more), we don’t change.
What lessons in other dimensions can the heatwave and eventual arrival of the moment of Petrichor bring to you, those you love, those you lead?