Life keeps moving.
Through birthdays and funerals.
Through wars on screens and dishes in the sink.
Through heartbreak and grocery lists and mornings where we open our eyes and wonder what we will see.
I walk through antique markets and touch things that outlived the people who loved them first.
A plate, a glass, a dish towel-
A letter folded worn at the corners.
A painting carried through decades by hands I’ll never know.
These things survived.
Wars. Hunger. Floods. Life.
Borders changing names.
Someone packed them into a suitcase once.
Someone held them against their chest while leaving home.
Someone decided this mattered enough to carry.
We keep going while the world turns through joy and tears and tears itself apart and rebuilds.
Nations rise. Countries burn. Children grow up. Somebody falls in love. Somebody else loses everything.
Most of it beyond us.
We protest. Donate. Boycott. Speak. Pray. Hope. Cry. Question. Turn away. Shake our heads.
Then the next morning comes-
Laundry. Lists. Bills. Bread. Invitations. Traffic.
The ordinary for some is extraordinary for many.
I sit in my home with food in the refrigerator.
Hot water. Electricity. A bed.
Things so normal here they almost disappear.
And somewhere else those things are miracles.
Sometimes it feels impossible to hold both truths at once.
Gratitude and guilt.
Beauty and brutality.
Safety built from someone else’s suffering.
Why here.
Why me.
Why does one person get softness while another spends their whole life surviving.
I keep thinking maybe nobody really knows where they’re going.
We pretend.
We make plans.
We speak about the future like it belongs to us.
We plant gardens.
We set tables.
We save photographs.
We pass down rings and recipes and stories.
We keep loving each other.
Maybe faith is just that.
Getting up again.
Boiling water for coffee.
Calling your mother.
Buying flowers.
Holding the door open.
Carrying something fragile through the world and hoping it reaches the next hands safely.
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