The Rain Still Knows

I was talking with some coworkers the other day about how Sundays used to feel different. Not necessarily just in nostalgia-forgotten-times different, but structurally different. Stores were closed. Restaurants too. Families had dinner together not because they were virtuous or better organized, but because there wasn’t anywhere else to be. Most of us didn’t have to work on the weekends. There was a kind of shared rhythm. A pause.

And yes, that rhythm came from laws that reflected religious ideas. Sunday as a day of rest. But underneath the religious reasoning, there was something deeply human about it. It gave people a day to be. Not to produce. Not to perform. Just… to be. I don’t think we’ve ever really reckoned with what we lost when that was replaced with 24-hour shopping and food delivery and always-on expectations in the name of capitalism.

That conversation was still lingering as I woke up yesterday morning to rain. I love the rain. Always have. I think part of that is because it feels like the world giving us permission to slow down. But lately, I’ve been thinking there’s more to it than that.

Rain doesn’t just fall. It returns. Every drop has been somewhere, has risen from ocean waves or gutters in cities, from sweat and soil and steam, only to rise, condense, and fall again. And when that water hits our skin, or fills our lungs as mist, or runs into our tea kettle, it’s not new. It’s ancient. Scientists have said that every breath we take contains molecules once exhaled by people who lived thousands of years ago. Molecules once inside the lungs of Caesar, or Genghis Khan, or Jesus. The atoms in our bodies at this very moment were once part of someone else’s storm, someone else’s story.

We are always breathing the past. And not just metaphorically.

So when it rains, I don’t just feel calm. I feel connected. And I think a lot of us do, even if we don’t have the words for it. Rain is a kind of returning. A remembering. It brings to us the places and shapes it has been.

I think that’s why showers feel sacred too. Especially for kids who fight getting in and also the ones who won’t get out. Sometimes those are the same kids. I know I was. Still am, a little. Because the shower is one of the only places where the world stops asking things of you. You don’t have to be anything in particular. You’re not solving a problem or meeting a goal. It’s just breath, warmth, rhythm, and presence. You can finally be in your body without apology.

And every now and then, in that steam and silence, something deeper slips in. A kind of stillness you don’t realize you’ve been starving for. It’s the moment people chase through years of meditation or yoga or prayer. Or remembering time around a family table years and years ago. It’s not about being spiritual or good. It’s about not being observed. Not being needed. Just being. Fully. Safely. Loved.

That’s what I think some kids are trying to hold onto when they take too long in the bathroom. It’s not rebellion. It’s a rescue mission. For five, ten, twenty minutes, they are not a grade or a gender or a disappointment or a to-do list. They are a body under water, experiencing molecules older than memory. Their own.

And I’m not saying let your water bill skyrocket. But I am saying: maybe the answer isn’t to yell at them to hurry up. Maybe the answer is to ask what else in their life gives them that same feeling. And if the answer is “nothing,” then maybe the problem isn’t them.

Because I think the truth is, most of us live in a state of constant low-level emergency. Fight or flight, all the time. Emails. Bills. News. Hustles. Metrics. We don’t just live under pressure, we live as pressure. And we’re so used to it, we don’t even realize how much of ourselves we’ve given up to keep surviving inside of it.

And if you ask why, I think that it’s because the system wants it that way. Capitalism doesn’t run on people who feel peaceful. It runs on people who are tired, scared, stretched thin, and too busy to look up. People who will click “add to cart” because they’re too overwhelmed to cook. People who will work two jobs and still feel like they haven’t done enough. People who measure their worth by how well they perform instead of how well they’re cared for.

And to keep those people spending, there have to be things to sell. So the system manufactures need. It sells rest in tiny, expensive doses. It sells comfort instead of care. Identity instead of belonging. We are just unsettled enough to never stop moving, and just distracted enough to blame each other for it. We should be listening to those reminding us to take the moment.

I see it every day. People showing up already frayed, snapping at cashiers, melting down in parking lots, resenting each other for things that aren’t really anyone’s fault. We think the enemy is the person in front of us. But most of the time, it’s the system behind us. It’s the exhaustion. The loneliness. The pressure to be more than a body, because we are more than our labor.

I don’t think it has to be this way.

But the reset we need isn’t just about wages or policy, it’s about pace. It’s about giving ourselves permission to live in alignment with the body we actually have, the time we’re actually given, and the truth that we are not meant to be machines. We are water. We are cycles. We are breath passed down through centuries.

There’s a line I heard recently from Gladiator II, a quiet little gut punch that keeps ringing in my head:

“A slave dreams not of freedom, but of a slave of their own.”

That’s what happens when the only vision of power we’ve ever seen is domination. We stop dreaming of peace and start dreaming of control. We try to climb the system instead of question why it’s there. And I think that’s what capitalism banks on, that we’ll internalize its rules so deeply that we stop imagining anything else.

That’s why I think it’s worth saying out loud that the “American dream,” for many people, has never really been freedom. It’s been proximity to power. And in this country, that often means proximity to the confidence of a mediocre white man.

It’s not just a meme. It’s a pattern. From Rome to Wall Street, the whole machine has been built around one image of success: someone who doesn’t have to be exceptional because the structure was always tilted in his favor. And the rest of us? We’ve either tried to prove we’re just as good, or tried to survive in the cracks.

And here’s the thing: if we are that person, or close to it, we might not realize how much of our humanity got carved away to fit into that mold. We may have told ourselves that we were winning, but the prize was numbness. Pressure. Disconnection.

And if you’re not that person, but you find yourself defending the system anyway, I get it. I really do. You’ve probably been told it’s the only thing standing between you and chaos. You’ve been taught to fear the collapse of a system that never truly served you, because at least it was familiar. At least you knew the rules. You felt safe.

But the cog you’ve become in someone else’s machine? That’s only a fraction of who you are. You were never meant to spend your brief time on this spinning planet just turning someone else’s gears.

And when you finally see that within this system, your success can only come at the cost of someone else’s harm, when you realize that getting ahead often means someone else falls behind, gets underpaid, overworked, overlooked, you begin to understand just how deep the design goes.

That’s when the question shifts. It’s no longer “How do I win?”

It becomes: Why does winning have to hurt someone?

And then: What if there’s a way to live where no one has to be degraded or devalued just so someone else can succeed?

Because if that world is possible, and I think it is, then it starts by imagining it. Then it grows by refusing to participate in anything that asks us to forget our shared humanity.

You are breath and salt and stardust. You are the echo of ancestors and the potential of tomorrow’s weather. You are a body shaped by the rain that fell on Rome, on Palestine, on the Mississippi Delta, on your great-grandmother’s porch.

And you deserve more than this.

So maybe this is the moment.

The moment we stop calling burnout a badge of honor and start calling it what it is.

A warning sign.

The moment we remember that stillness isn’t laziness. It’s clarity.

The moment we stop waiting for permission to slow down, and give it to each other.

Not a rewind. A re-rooting.

Because the rain still knows how to fall.

And the breath still knows how to connect us.

And somewhere in the rhythm of that remembering, we will start to feel human again.