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Creativity Quote by Johnny Nash

"I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way"

About this Quote

Clarity is the fantasy every hard season sells us: that one day the weather breaks and the world finally stops arguing with our eyesight. Johnny Nash’s line lands because it treats relief not as a miracle but as a shift in perception. The rain isn’t just sadness; it’s interference. When it’s gone, the speaker doesn’t claim the road is suddenly smooth. He claims he can see the obstacles. That’s the sly emotional upgrade: not “no problems,” but “problems I can name, map, and move through.”

The phrasing is plainspoken and insistently visual, like someone opening a curtain and refusing to be dragged back into the dark. “Clearly” and “gone” do the heavy lifting, compressing a whole narrative of endurance into two blunt, satisfying clicks. Then “all obstacles” flips the usual pop promise. Most songs offer escape; Nash offers orientation. It’s resilience without the macho posturing - the courage of being unsentimental about what’s ahead.

Context matters here: “I Can See Clearly Now” arrives in the early 1970s, when pop and soul were increasingly comfortable making private feeling sound like public weather. Nash, working in a reggae-leaning idiom that moves forward with steady patience, pairs the lyric with a buoyant groove that refuses to dramatize pain. The music smiles while the words do something tougher: they normalize the idea that healing is less about forgetting the storm than about learning to navigate after it.

Quote Details

TopicOptimism
SourceSong 'I Can See Clearly Now' (1972), written and recorded by Johnny Nash; opening lines: 'I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way.'
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nash, Johnny. (2026, January 15). I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-can-see-clearly-now-the-rain-is-gone-i-can-see-167839/

Chicago Style
Nash, Johnny. "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-can-see-clearly-now-the-rain-is-gone-i-can-see-167839/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-can-see-clearly-now-the-rain-is-gone-i-can-see-167839/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Johnny Nash (August 19, 1940 - October 6, 2020) was a Musician from USA.

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