It's a hot day, you've spent all afternoon doing yard work with the sun beating down on you as you scoop shovel after shovel after shovel of mulch into a wheelbarrow, bring it from flowerbed to flowerbed, and spread it. By the time you reach the last flowerbed your body has accumulated dirt, sweat, and an itchy feeling. You look forward to showering, getting clean, and cooling off. You finish up while a herd of gray clouds rolls in and unleash a downpour. You decide to try something different: stand out in the rain and enjoy it, letting go of your aversion to getting wet. You even decide to do something really unusual, you lay on the ground and make a water angel.

We all go through life with imaginary rules-- that is to say, ideas we have in our head of a certain way things are, why they are that way, and why they must be that way. However, they're only that, ideas in our head--- fantasies, fabrications, stories we tell ourselves, rather than objective, tangible, actual laws with a punishment for violation. The only punishments for these rules are the punishments we create.

For example, typically when it rains and I am outside I follow the rule of "spend as little time in the rain as possible to stay dry," but what if I let go of staying dry? What if I don't mind getting a little wet? What if I even want to? Avoiding the rain yields no gain, leaving me free to embrace and find enjoyment in what is normally an uncomfortable situation.

By becoming comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, the realm of experiences I am capable of having is blown wide open and I'm free to hang out with the rain and have fun in it. I was gonna shower anyways, why not cool off before I even go inside?

However, before one can break these imaginary rules, there is one rule that must first be broken to get there, that is the rule that "the opinion and approval of others is important to me." The act of letting commonly held ideas go results in the disapproval of others, as your actions become a spit in the face to the norms that they embrace day in and out. As I stood in the rain my parents looked at me like I had 5 heads. It's surely an unusual thing, I mean, willingly standing out in the rain, let alone enjoying it????? It's a violation, it's not normal!!!! And that's exactly what makes it fun.

Think all the times you've acted as though you would melt if a certain amount of rain hit you. It makes every drop feel like acid weighing you down and melting away. The second you choose to accept and embrace the rain, it's no different than a shower, except you're outside and amused by those taking it so seriously as to act like staying dry is a "rule". As Alan Watts said "Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun".

Try it on, find an imaginary or socially constructed rule that feels like second nature, and see what happens when you choose to let it go. Doing so allows you to be with and live in the world as it is, rather than how it "should be lived in."