Good people. An energy that makes life simple, a warmth that calms the mind. The rain fell hard this morning. The unexpected rain became the mood of the day; I watched outside the window, the saturated sky.

The rain fell sideways and splashed against the marble tables and against the open umbrellas.

The green leaves of the trees which line the road rustled in the cold wind. I felt the wind’s touch, sitting in the back of a coffee shop.

When the day is warm and blue, I want to be outside and experience the sun. In the rain, I retreat into myself and write my story over.

I love to let the sounds of a shop wash through me — the coffee machine hissed as I listened to the different conversations between locals. See you tomorrow, I heard one say. Then back into the pouring rain.

I met a good man this morning. Jurgen, from Sweden. What should I do if I go to Sweden? I asked.

He thought about it for a long moment, wearing a subtle smile.

“Coffee and pastry,” he replied as he sipped his black espresso. “They have good coffee.”

People are good, man. At least we’re trying to be. But this life, it can get the best of us. To have faith is to assume the best; to see human beings as individuals and treat them as such.

We won’t always see eye to eye, and we must take these experiences as they come. But what does that mean to not see eye to eye? That our experiences haven’t matched up, and our opinions differ.

We’re here to learn. Grow stronger from what we learn. Never lose faith in people. Get up and try again. Our hearts may hurt, and when they do we experience the world through a hurting soul — but that doesn’t mean that we can’t change.

“I imagine,” wrote James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son, “that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

We can alleviate somebody else’s hurting. Maybe we feel undeserving of love. We tell ourselves we don’t deserve to feel good; we aren’t worthy of happiness in our own skin.

We turn on each other because we can’t find it in our hearts to love ourselves. We are worthy of love, no matter what the world says. But that’s an understanding we must come to on our own.

Treat others as human beings deserving of love; treat one another as eternal souls, and experience a shift in reality.

Good people; you know it when you look into their eyes. You see yourself, what you could be, the thing is we decide. Perhaps we’re never told that we choose who we could be. Get out there and be it.

Our mold of identity cracks with every step we take to grow. It shakes and shatters every time our heart beats faster, willing us to live. We confront that opportunity again and again, until there’s nothing left.

Life is built upon experience.

But is experience either good or bad, or is it just experience? Part of earth’s story? The earth needs sun; it seeks serenity and warmth. But the earth is a rainy day, a stormy sea, a wild, raging sky. We need it all to become what we could be.

“One writes out of one thing only,” writes Baldwin. “One’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

We are living stories with an unknown ending, undefined, until one day the story ends. Don’t hold on when you’re begging to let go. The rain can wash away the past. Step into it and don’t hold back.