sit beneath the shade of a barberry’s branches and understand that generosity is older than thought. trees feed the weak. they slow their growth for the young. they give what is theirs to the sick. on this there is no debate.

run your fingers over moss-covered bark and know you’re touching layers of time. a tree’s outer skin is also its diary, marked by drought and storm and calm. it bears itself freely, wearing its history.

notice the ragged years after a mass flowering, when trees look bare and exhausted. beauty often requires sacrifice. our generosity leaves us vulnerable. but it also ensures a certain blooming; that the dance will go on.

watch insects devour a leaf, and understand: being alive means being part of a whole, not above of one. we all give. we are all taken from. you are not the exception.

observe the way seedlings wait in the earth for years, sometimes decades. patience is a strategy. timing is everything. growth is not always immediate. readiness is the only door.

much like trees, we are the improbable survivors of a vast and silent lottery. the odds of you reading this, breathing, are as slim as a beech seed becoming a forest elder: your life is, by all accounts, a statistical fluke. our heart beats, our lungs fill, but like trees who endure storms and rot to one day blossom, we are the rarest outcome of a million failed tries.

and when a seed does catch in the earth perfectly, prepared to sprout, survival is still a rarity, aging an even more unlikely accident of chance. so too with us. we are not guaranteed survival. we are not guaranteed joy. and yet we still spend ourselves— our time, our strength, our youth— on the sensible, human work of living. we raise children, plant gardens, write poems, and fall in love; make soup, care for aging parents, whistle and cry and pray and believe in one other.

Monique Marani

My offering to you on this gray December morning is this: I want you to understand, in your heart, inside your bloodstream, deep in your marrow, that everything will always hurt your feelings and that’s a good thing. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Gatsby, you have something rare and special, a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” “an extraordinary gift for hope,” “a romantic readiness” that’s precious and worthy of respect.

When you’re aligned with this truth, you recognize that your huge heart makes it very, very frightening to invest in what you love. Your heightened sensitivity makes it extremely difficult to stick with the people, places, and things that light you up the most. Your ebullient soul will sometimes abandon what you need the most and you won’t even know why. You will simply lose the thread, get distracted, move on, withdraw, and you won’t recognize what you’re doing.

But when you dare to feel the pain of being what you are — a sensitive instrument, an open window, a tiny bird perched on the shaky limb of a huge tree in a windstorm, fragile and uncertain and volatile and wildly alive — you gain renewed respect for yourself. You understand why the world is so hard on you. When you respect this pain, you can feel vibrant inside your sensitivity, passionate inside your fear, hungry inside your anger, soulful inside your sadness, brilliant inside your anxious need for more love.

Heather Havrilesky