I was reading a book in a warm conservatory when a splash of water fell on me. I looked up, thinking the roof was leaking and that I might need to move. But the water had come from a drop of condensation that was rolling down the underside of the glass roof, collecting more moisture as it went along. It had become too heavy for its own surface tension to be able to hold it up against the pull of gravity.
It dripped a second time and a third, and then equilibrium was restored. The droplet was no longer too heavy to hold itself up, and it carried on down the roof, leaving behind it a kind of snail trail as it passed through steamed up patches. There were a whole lot of these snail trails up there, descending the roof at various angles, and each one was lined with a series of small static droplets like glass beads, which the larger rolling droplets seemed to leave behind themselves at more or less regular intervals.
I spent some time looking up at this little system powered by heat and gravity, lazily mulling over the physics of it all, when I noticed that, beyond the glass, a series of ragged clouds were passing rapidly across the blue sky above me, one after another.
I suddenly felt entirely at peace.
