That’s Adel’s gift to 2011 and certainly one of my favourite
of her songs. Though I like the song for the emotion in it, I interpret the
phrase entirely differently; for me it means doing the impossible. You cannot
set fire to the water, never mind droplets of water falling from the sky, where
do you start.
The year has finally kicked off and there are a lot of
decisions to be made as a result of imminent opportunities. It is the making of
decisions and managing feelings and expectations that has led me to feel
that I am setting fire to rain. I don’t want to lose this opportunity as the
saying “opportunity knocks but once”, looms ominously at the back of my mind. The
thing is, I actually don’t believe that you only have one shot, I do think opportunity
comes pretty often but we are not always in a position to act on it; we would be
lucky to even recognise it; another saying declares that “Opportunities always
look bigger going than coming” which explains why we don’t always see it or
perhaps see it all too clearly in hindsight. Perhaps they are often disguised
as problems, and any wise man worth his salt knows that for every problem there
is an opportunity.
It seems like the opposite is the case here, the taking of this
opportunity comes with its problems. The biggest problem of all is the risk of
missing out on it. If opportunities look bigger going than coming, then I will be trounced
by this one leaving; it is as clear as day to anyone the magnitude of this one a-coming.
