Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 PT2

There are moments in life that feel like everything has been cut off without warning—no explanation, just betrayal. Of true love. Of friendship. That kind of pain doesn't stay on the surface. It reopens what you thought had already healed, bringing back the quiet weight of abandonment, rejection, and being left without understanding. This piece is a response to that—the concrete imploding, the pressure, the places where nothing should be able to grow. And yet, life doesn't stop. Like flowers breaking through pavement, it pushes forward—not gently, but forcefully. Expanding, blooming, moving past what was meant to contain it. Because even in the darkest places, something in us keeps going. I'll be lying in bed at night, hand on my chest, feeling my heartbeat and realizing it has never stopped for a single second since I was born. Not once. It has carried me through everything without asking for anything in return. Sometimes I want to apologize to my own body for treating it like a machine that has to justify its existence. When you zoom in close enough, life isn't made of the grand narratives we like to tell. It's made of unbearably small things—microscopic tenderness. The way light moves through a room. The way dust floats in sunlight like tiny planets suspended in gold. The quiet sound of someone existing in another space, steady and reassuring. The softness that insists on showing up in places it shouldn't—like a single flower blooming through a concrete sidewalk. It makes me want to hold everything closer—the beauty, the boredom, the happiness, the sadness. It all matters. It means something touched me deeply enough to leave a mark. And what is a bruise, if not evidence of contact. Even if, eventually, it heals. I don't want to move through life untouched. I don't want to remain pristine and distant from my own experience. I want to be marked by it—to feel it fully, the weight and the breaking and the becoming. To say I was here. I let it happen to me. I didn't stand outside my own life taking notes. This is what growth looks like—not quiet, not controlled, but undeniable. Not something we manufacture on our own, but something that continues moving in us and through us.