Opening an umbrella indoors
In Madagascar, opening an umbrella indoors was said to make it rain. An umbrella is a tool built for outside, so opening one at home is a handy image of habits carried into the wrong room.
What it may mean
An umbrella is built for the street: it snaps open fast, spreads wide and expects open air around it. In a hallway it suddenly becomes a hazard, sweeping a vase off the shelf or catching someone's face. Nothing is wrong with the umbrella; it is simply in the wrong room. The same goes for the habits you carry from one part of life into another, where they no longer fit: the brisk manager voice that comes home with you, the guarded posture from a hard year that you still carry to new friends, the vacation looseness that drifts into a deadline week. Each one was useful somewhere. Before you open it, it is worth asking whether this is the place for it.
Depending on how you saw it
Opening it to dry in the hallway
A wet umbrella dries faster open, which is why plenty of people stand it open in the hall or the tub after a downpour. The same act is sensible in one moment and careless in another. What do you do out of good habit that might need a little more thought about where and when?
A child opening one to play
To a child an open umbrella indoors is a tent, a shield and a roof, and the rules about it seem silly. Play turns tools into something new. Where could you borrow a tool from one area of your life and use it playfully in another?
A spring-loaded umbrella popping open
Automatic umbrellas open with a sudden snap at the press of a button, faster than people expect. What in your life opens faster and wider than you planned, a temper, a promise, a plan, once someone presses the button?
Why it happens in nature
Modern umbrellas fold on a frame of thin metal ribs, and many open with a spring catch that snaps the canopy out fast and wide. Indoors that is enough to knock over a lamp or catch someone in the eye, which is reason enough for care. Opening a wet umbrella to dry in a hallway or tub is common and helps keep it from mildewing.
What folk beliefs say
Madagascar
In Madagascar, putting up an umbrella in the house was believed to cause rain.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 507. View the page
To reflect on
Which habit from one area of your life have you been opening in a room where it no longer fits?