From cloud to ground, a raindrop travels an average of a mile, riven on collision with a building top or open umbrella, absorbed when it touches earth or a canopy of trees.

Gravity fights the upward force of air; a raindrop reaches terminal velocity — the maximum speed an object can reach while falling through a fluid like water or air — and coasts toward its destination, often the top of our head.

This interplay of forces softens the impact of the falling water, becoming what we know as rain, a minor inconvenience or, if you’re like me, a veering from normality and a reason to watch the sky shift, the clouds speak, the moon vying for its chance to shine.

Rain falls, inspiring a meditation. Watching a single drop rolling down a windowpane, I feel things will be alright. All is okay. As long as there’s the sun and rain, things will be okay.

It can seem like we have control of life, and in a sense we do, as we choose where to focus our energy. But beyond the veil of control are greater forces at play, connections unseen like the forces of rain.

Yet we don’t question it. We accept that rain’s a part of life, sometimes adding beauty to a bucolic landscape, a thriving city, a dense forest. Maybe it’s depressing — suffusing with grey the landscape of our mind. Either way, rain is a part of life, one of my favorite things about being alive on planet Earth.

Rain isn’t personal. It can’t hurt us. Terminal velocity makes rain soft, as the planet’s evolution has developed to such an extraordinary degree where human beings may dance beneath water falling from the sky.

I like to think that the forces behind rain are the same ones guiding me; that connections are being made I cannot see, at least not in this plane of reality.

I’m choosing where to focus my energy — writing this, for instance, an act which gives me joy and improves my life; but it’s an illusion to believe things will happen exactly the way we hope or expect.

We’re never truly in control. Nobody has it figured out.

We’re all just people, and we feel the same emotions, fears, joys, and desires for validation, no matter the stage of life we’re in.

I’m standing in a forest. I look back at all that I’ve made it through, and I can hardly see the entrance, the place where the journey began. I was called to this path by some force of nature. I figured I’d discover something of myself in here, accumulating scratches and scrapes, brushing against leaves with my feet in the mud.

A life worth living, a dream worth chasing, a chance at making something cool. Here I am, lost among the viridescent leaves. They change colors at different times of day — golden in the morning, a pale green at noon, and in the evening the leaves take on a different shade, amber and purple and blue as the sunlight fades, and I’m here listening to them speak. It’s my own heart beating, and I realize in that moment why I entered this world.

It’s daunting, but I can’t go back.

Every day we’re changing. Every day, every step, every question answered inspires another to chase.

While you read this, I’m actually in a forest, looking around, looking within. I’m here with my friends, the guys who have known me from the start, loved me as I’ve loved them.

Being here this long has made me less afraid. I’m nowhere near the end. I look up at the astral sea, an ocean sprawling to infinity. Whatever’s up there, I wonder if they’re seekers too, reaching for light, a sense of being, a purpose to it all.

And I think that’s it. For a moment in time we walk this earth, long enough to feel something; long enough to ask, why.

There is no reason. But there are forests and there are leaves, there are friends and there is rain, there’s love and there is pain, miracles and darkness; and for a moment we get to fall — fall through time and go somewhere, and where we land is where we’re meant to be.

Terminal velocity, the weight of existence fighting the weight of expectations; at a certain point, there’s nothing to do but let go. And then we may, like the rain, fall softly.