Seasons of life

Maybe the hardest seasons of life teach us a different version of happiness. Maybe in those seasons the things you live for, the things you value most seem so small in comparison to what you were filling your soul with in the past, seem so quiet in contrast.

Maybe it is within those moments that your eyes are opened, that you learn how to find joy and peace and safety in that which you did not even notice before.

Maybe in this season of life where your heartaches or loss has built a home within you, happiness changes. Maybe it becomes your morning cup of coffee, sitting and drinking it as the sun rises and the world wakes up around you.

Maybe happiness becomes the way the light plays with the trees in your favorite park, maybe it is the way the sky looks at your favorite tune at night, the way the moon fills the air with an energy you can feed in your bones when you really sit with yourself and let your solitude wash over you.

Maybe in the messiest moments in life, maybe it is your mother’s voice, maybe it is the beauty you feel when you see your kids faces when you hug them for twenty minutes straight. When you sit with your friends in silence and feel so understood and so seen in all that you are.

Maybe in the most complicated moments, happiness simplifies, in a deeply profound way. Maybe it exists in the songs you listen to and the way your pen scratches across your journal in the morning. Maybe it exists in the quiet, in the moments where you fully connect with yourself and you love yourself and you are kind to yourself in all that is gritty and all that is hard and all that is unanswered in your life.

Maybe the hardest seasons in life teach you that happiness is small. That it exists in the stillness that it echoes through you in the most nameless moments. That it cracks within our lives in ways we have not always connected.And maybe this season life is teaching us  that those moments are not small at all.

That those fleeting experiences, that those simple encounters have always been saving you. Have always held weight, have always been the things that mattered the most.

Maybe this season is teaching us how to connect with ourselves and how we really feel. To connect with the things and the people that make our hearts burst in the midst of all the pain and fear that we are experiencing. Maybe this season is teaching us that connection is way more than something physical. That genuine connection exists within hoping for, caring for, diving into those we love. Maybe this season is teaching us that the marrow of life is to be found in how deeply we crash into the souls we love, that we should tell those in our lives that we care for them, that we are grateful for them.

And when the beauty of everything falls apart at the same time, maybe the lesson is distilled and pressed into our hearts right now.  That no matter what, no matter how dark or uncertain and heavy it becomes, we will always survive the storms.  Not because it does not throw us off or it does not hurt,but because we survive ,we shift, we re-evaluate what is important to us , what needs our attention. Our perspective changes.

Maybe this season is teaching us to take less for granted. To appreciate the beauty in nature and the beauty of the people in our lives, the beauty of their presence. That happiness is not found in materialistic things, what it means to show up when it’s difficult and when things are hard.

Maybe this season is teaching us to pay more attention to the relationships in our lives, to really connect with the people in our lives who heal us, who make us want to want to get up in the morning, who save us.

 Maybe this season is teaching us to connect with what does not matter. The things and the people and the commitments that do not make us feel good, that do not inspire us, that do not seem so important now that we have the capacity to truly and deeply, sit with and encourage what is within us.

Maybe this season is helping us take stock of the space we held in our lives for the things that do not deserve it or value or honor it. Maybe in this season we are being taught how to defend our hearts, our energy, our hope. Maybe it’s teaching us how to let go in more ways than what is obvious. Maybe we are being taught how to reconnect with what truly ignites us. What truly deserves to stay.