Practice mindfulness with others

Cameroonian Proverb

This proverb starts with a simple observation about weather, that rain falls broadly across an area, soaking every roof it passes over rather than singling one house out. It is being used to make a point about hardship and circumstance more generally, that difficulty rarely affects only the person experiencing it directly, even when it feels intensely personal and isolating. Whatever rain is falling on you, financial strain, illness, grief, conflict, is very likely falling on other roofs nearby too, sometimes visibly, sometimes quietly behind closed doors. The proverb is a gentle correction to the very natural but often inaccurate feeling that your particular struggle is uniquely yours, unprecedented, and unshared.

“Practice mindfulness with others” connects this observation to a specific behavior rather than leaving it as a comforting abstraction. If rain genuinely does not fall on one roof alone, then paying attention only to your own roof, your own hardship, your own needs, misses most of what is actually happening around you. Mindfulness here means staying alert to the fact that the people near you, neighbors, coworkers, family, strangers, are very possibly weathering their own version of whatever you are going through, even when they show no outward sign of it. This is a call to look outward during hard moments rather than only inward, on the basis that isolation in suffering is often more a failure of attention than an accurate description of reality.

As motivation, this idea works against two common responses to hardship, both of which depend on the false belief that your rain is somehow yours alone. One is excessive self pity, the sense that no one else could understand or has faced anything like this. The other is excessive isolation, the instinct to suffer privately rather than reach toward others who might be standing under the same storm. The proverb suggests a third option, recognizing shared weather as an invitation to connection rather than competition over whose hardship is worse, and noticing that the people around you, who are also getting wet, are often the most natural source of shelter, company, and mutual understanding available to you.