Some will hit you. Others won’t. Even if a thought misses you by only half an inch, it’s still an idea you’ll never have. A sentence you’ll never write. An apology you’ll never make. And the ones that do make contact with your brain? They’ll be a potpourri of potpourris — and you’ll have little say in its ingredients.
The only thing we know for sure about rain is that, eventually, it is going to end. These thoughts, too, will pass. Meditation is learning to stand in the rain without running from it. To not need to find shelter. When you meditate, you bathe in the awareness that thoughts are temporary and that, for every single one, we have a choice whether to engage with it or not.
When a raindrop falls on your skin, you can feel it. Its physical impact is undeniable. But whether you get upset at it, whether you lean into the feeling that “you’re cold” or “wet” or “there’s now a stain on my favorite sweater,” that’s up to you. You can’t deny the impulse — but you can choose how you’ll react to it.
Sometimes, the rain keeps falling longer than we’d like. When that happens, as in that song lamenting this very phenomenon, we can either yell at the sun for “sleeping on the job,” or we can admit that we’re “never gonna stop the rain by complaining.”
Whether it takes you a week of meditation, a decade, or only a little thinking, once you see that thoughts are as temporary as everything else in this life, you’ll also conclude that, “crying’s not for me — because I’m free, nothing’s worrying me.”