Feeling Bored on a Rainy Day? Here's What I Do

Sylvia Plath once wrote in her diary,

"Rain on roof outside window, grey light, deep covers and warm blankets. Rain and nip of autumn in air; nostalgia, itch to work better and bigger."

In a peculiar romantic way, rain has always served as an inspiration even for the most seasoned authors. Thousands of people, writer or not, have written poems on rain even just once during their lifetime. In this endeavor, I am no exception either. My own name, Nirjhara, implies rain and waterfall in Sanskrit.

As a consequence, I have always associated rain with my identity throughout my childhood, and I would commemorate it through activities of personal pleasure. Here are some of my activities on a rainy day that you can enjoy as well!

1. Reading For Pleasure

My appetite for reading has always been voracious. Rain merely serves as a catalyst. On a rainy day, I would create this bubble of isolation around myself: sitting in a garden chair on the balcony, propping my feet up on the ottoman, the scent of potted roses wafting in with the rainy breeze, sipping milk tea while enjoying the concise yet sensual writing of Ernaux.

As much as this vision is picturesque, I hardly ever get to accomplish it. Most of the time, I am stuck inside and tend to suffer from damp perspiration.

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However, it hardly deters me from enjoying the pleasures of reading. Damp weather usually makes me deviate towards spy fiction or novels exploring the complexity of female characters. I remember it being a particularly thunderous day when I started reading Eric Ambler's Cause for Alarm.

In the modern world, we hardly get a moment to enjoy reading novels. A rainy day serves as the perfect opportunity for that. What's more, you can also have a favourite genre to lose yourself in on a rainy day!

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2. Leisure Baking

Everybody's busy on weekdays: parents with demanding jobs and children with school and college. People get very few chances for relaxation. Rainy days are one of those.

While a person may take a walk for refreshment on a sunny day, one can achieve the same results by baking on a damp day. Baking helps to divert my attention from my strenuous studies and other engagements. It allows me to focus my attention on creating a delicious cake or buttery biscuits. In turn, it helps me reorganise my mind and relieve the tension from my muscles.

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I have been said to have a sweet tooth, so, naturally, I find myself craving sweets on rainy days. Sometimes, this is simply the reason why I bake. Nevertheless, baking can have a refreshing and fulfilling effect on your mental health and empty your mind of all stressful thoughts.

3. Binge-Watching Movies

When my mind is way too out of sorts for comprehensive reading or inordinately lazy for baking, I resort to binge-watching movies. Sometimes I watch my old-fav movies, sometimes I go out of my way to watch new films. For instance, I can remember watching The Good Shepherd on the last rainy day to date.

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Watching movies is perhaps one of the easiest and most accessible ways for enjoyment. I usually don't have much work on rainy days. So, the abundance of time on rainy days means I can watch an entire series without any break, allowing me to enjoy and understand the plot superbly.

Besides, you can also make good use of a rainy day by watching movies that are on your bucket list without any interruptions.

4. Getting Creative and Messy

There is a proverb that 'Life is short, but art is long.' A rainy day gives us the idyllic opportunity to get a hands-on experience of this philosophy. I remember fondly that when I was younger, I used to make paper boats and watch them float in the muddy puddles just after the rain.

The boats rarely floated for long and turned into an unrecognisable soggy mess, but this innocuous activity used to bring me an inexplicable sense of elation that I scarcely found from other pastimes.

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Now, at the cusp of adulthood, I might not make simple boats out of paper anymore on a rainy day, but I do try to allot some of my free time to make Origami crafts. I find this particular Japanese art to be mentally invigorating; it helps push my mind beyond my comfortable boundaries.

Hence, whilst it is pouring cats and dogs outside, I find myself obsessing over how to make my art more complex and trying new methods in the comfort of my warm bedroom. So, the damp weather allows you to focus on one specific form of art or enjoy a wide range of creative activities without any trouble.

Takeaways

At the end of the day, a rainy day is merely a conduit. The choice is yours. You can spend a rainy day in any way you want.

You can watch a movie, read a book, bake cookies, and sketch landscapes. Or, you can simply take a warm bath and focus on caring for yourself. The main point of a rainy day is that you should not only survive it but also appreciate it in your own way and alleviate some of the stress from your hectic life.