A Soft Honoring
I let myself honor, in my own way, the long year I have walked. I am allowed to be tender with myself today.
Have you let yourself, even once this year, simply sit with the fact of having walked the long path you have walked? Tomorrow is Day 365. Today is a soft pause before that doorway. Today is for honoring — gently, faithfully — in your own way, what has been quietly happening inside you.
The honoring does not have to be loud. You do not have to celebrate. You do not have to feel any particular feeling. You only have to let yourself, in some small way, mark the year.
Perhaps you take a slower morning. Perhaps you make the cup of something warm and hold it longer. Perhaps you go outside and notice the light. Perhaps you sit, for a little while, with the simple fact of having walked this long, slow path.
Perhaps you do something small that the version of you a year ago could not have imagined doing — answer the phone gently, or not answer it at all, or read a quiet book in a quiet room, or let yourself feel tenderness for the part of you that was, before you knew what you know now.
Perhaps you say to yourself, quietly, in a private moment: thank you, for staying. You do not have to mean it in a grand way. You can mean it in the small way it actually wants to be meant. Thank you, for not letting go of yourself, on the days when letting go would have been easier.
Look at the small kept light of this ordinary morning. The cup. The window. The breath. The face you are quietly the keeper of. The harbor you have become. The lighthouse you did not know you were lighting until you were already lighting it.
That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.