It’s been a long time since I’ve written here. Life didn’t gently get busy...it swallowed me whole. Days piled on top of each other, obligations blurred together, and somewhere in between I forgot to sit with myself long enough to put words down.
Someone told me a while ago that I should try and write about the joy in being alive, but most likely I think they meant for me to find it and not just write about it...
Joy.
It sounds almost out of place in a book like this...a place where I usually come to unload, to confess, to bleed a little. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that joy doesn’t contradict this space at all. It belongs here. Maybe it’s always belonged here.
I thought about it for a long time. I’ve always been the kind of person who notices things...the way light hits buildings, the quiet of trees, the small expressions on people’s faces. I slow down. I take it in. I look for reasons to feel okay, to feel grateful, to feel something close to happiness.
But even then, I couldn’t say that that was the joy of being alive. It felt gentler than that. Safer. Almost rehearsed.
Then there was this night.
Late November, maybe early December. I was walking home from uni after a long stretch of late lectures. The cold wasn’t polite...it cut through everything. My hands were numb, my breath fogged the air, and the world felt hard and tired, frozen, the way I felt.
And then I saw it.
A tree.
Bare, frozen, stiff with cold...and yet, somehow, it was blooming. Flowers. Real ones. Alive. Defiant. Completely out of place.
I stopped walking.
That moment hit me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Because nothing about that tree made sense. It shouldn’t have been blooming. It had every reason not to. And yet, there it was...choosing life anyway.
I think that’s the best image I have for the joy of being alive.
Not loud. Not easy. Not warm.
But stubborn. Paradoxical. Unexpected.
Alive in the middle of the cold.
Raw.
And unbearably beautiful.
