RAINDROPS ON the window pane defined your first remembered act of contemplation. At about age 4, you would stretch out on the fat backrest of the sofa that pressed against the windowsill. Longing to go out and play, you aimed only to peer at the backyard - the sand box, swing set, upended tricycle. “Rain, rain, go away. . .’’ Your first lyric. “Come again some other day.’’
But soon enough, the focus of your gaze would shift. The outer world would disappear, and suddenly the panoply of raindrops on the window pane came clear right before your nose.
Tiny nodules of water, slapping at the glass, took over the field of your concentration, which then organized itself around a new astonishment. The drops of water were engaged in a spirited competition, arranging themselves in chutes and then sliding haphazardly for the bottom of the window.
A race! All at once, the competing drops hit you as a sport of the weather. One drop made its jagged way down the pane, while another shot swiftly past. Liquid commotion of rainfall was transformed by the venue of glass into the order of contest. Soon, you began making bets with yourself, picking a favorite.
A drop would congeal at the top of a glistening channel down which other speedsters had run, and you would say, go! But the glistening bead would just sit there, while others took off. Soon you realized that it was impossible to predict which drop would win. The order of competition dissolved into the disorder of pure randomness. Every bet you made you lost.
You did not know it at the time, of course, but you were taking a first lesson in the tension between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, between the inexorable force of gravity (pulling the water down) and the capriciousness of chance (water falling by accident). You saw a law of nature against the lawlessness of variability. The “random walk’’ of raindrops, an unknown phrase from statistical analysis, was your first metaphor for the unpredictability of life.
Within ranges of reason, the haphazard shapes the future, and you saw it, as you would from then on - from the luck of the friends you made at kindergarten to the soul-sinking collapse of your retirement fund. Wonder at the sport of the weather became that other kind of wonder - wondering as a form of doubt. In realizing that there were no sure bets in the little race of raindrops, you wondered what, actually, is certain anywhere?
When Darwin’s theory of evolution became controversial, offense was taken at the ideas that the world was not created in seven days; that it was millions, not thousands, of years old; and that humans were neither unique, nor uniquely made.
But the truly radical idea embedded in Darwin’s scheme was that the mechanism of evolution involved significant elements of randomness, which undercut naive notions of a Creator’s “design.’’
Such randomness was taken to suggest purposelessness, as if all that exists is mere accident, having no more significance than the transitory plunge of a raindrop from the top of a window pane to the bottom. A sport of the weather is the sport of the given world, period.
But even at age 4, you sensed something more - without remotely being able to say what. The main experience you had on those rainy afternoons was not of the raindrops, but of your own perception of them.
The true wonder was in that felt experience of consciousness. There was an order in what you beheld, but it was an order that was coming from your act of beholding, and you knew that.
You played that trick of shifting the range of your focus, so that in one moment the sandbox outdoors filled your mind, and in the next the racing rivulets an inch from your nose did.
Background and foreground were chosen elements - chosen by you.
Soon enough, as wonder had opened into wondering, consciousness opened into self-consciousness, as you realized that you were the master of interpretation. You knew. You knew that you knew. There were raindrops, and there was the beholding of them. The thrill of your interior life had begun, and from then on, rainy days were welcome.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
