People hate rain. You don’t need to ask them. You can just tell. Brollys go up and eyes down as people hurriedly dodge puddles on their way to the nearest plane, train or automobile that’ll trundle them home at the end of a hard day’s grind.

I don’t hate the rain. I used to, of course. I cycle everywhere and rain makes it cold and dangerous and makes you look stupid on arrival. But today, as I sat impotently at a red light, I decided I was going to like the rain instead.

“What, just like that?” you say, eyebrow raised. Well, almost. You see, we don’t have to hate the rain, or indeed anything.* It’s a question of the perspective we take on it. As the eponymous hero of Hamlet says in Act 2, Scene 2 “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

“Okay, so how exactly do you think about rain to make you like it?” you quiz. Happiness, I claim, is caused by how we feel about what we pay attention to. So if we want to be happier about something, we can either change how we feel or what we pay attention to. And I think we can do this about just about anything. That sounds a bit abstract, so, to explain it, here were the thoughts that went through my head as I cycled home today.

First, I realised that, actually, when I paid attention to how cold and wet the rain was and just accepted, rather than fought it, it didn’t seem so bad. I recognised the rain was, at most, a temporary inconvenience and mentally shrugged my shoulders.

Second, I thought that if rain was the biggest thing I had to worry about at that moment, I was very fortunate. I counted my blessings about being generally healthy, happy and alive. Worse things happen at sea, you know.

Then I focused on the fact I would soon be out of the rain, back in my warm flat, drinking awful coffee. In anticipation, I started to enjoy the image of me walking through the door, changing out of my wet clothes and putting the kettle on.

As I passed a newly laid stretch of payment I noticed how the rain coating it caused a lake-like reflection of the building in front of it. I took a mental moment to appreciate just how beautiful this was and how, without the rain, there would be no beautiful reflection.

After than I started to get a bit meta: I felt happy that I was aware of my thoughts and perspectives and had the mental tools available to change how I think about the world.

Then, in front of me, I saw a huge puddle. I grinned, squealed “weee” louder than I care to admit and ploughed straight through pretending I was a jet-ski.

Now, this might seem like a lot of thought to put into thinking about rain, but the point isn’t really about rain. It’s that by learning to change how you feel or what you pay attention to you can turn experiences you’d ordinarily find miserable into ones you enjoy.

*I say “anything”. I’m less sure how much we can change our feelings about our raw sensations of pain. Whilst some people claim to like pain, I wonder if the painfulness of the pain is overcome by the joy of looking fabulous in leather and doing naughty things.