The Morning You Almost Skipped

Last Tuesday I almost didn't go for my walk. It was grey out, the kind of grey that makes the bed feel like the only reasonable place to be, and I had a list of perfectly good reasons to stay inside. I went anyway — not out of discipline, honestly, but because I'd run out of milk and the walk to the corner shop was the path of least resistance.

On the way back I passed an older woman struggling with a grocery bag that had split at the seam, oranges rolling down the pavement like small escaping suns. I helped her gather them. We talked for maybe four minutes. She told me her husband had died in the spring, that this was the first week she'd felt able to leave the house, and that she'd been afraid no one would notice if she simply stopped going out at all. Then she thanked me, and we went our separate ways, and I stood on the corner for a long moment holding my milk and feeling the morning rearrange itself behind me.

The days we don't circle on the calendar

I have always assumed that the important days announce themselves. That they come with a certain weight, a sense of occasion, a feeling in the air that says pay attention, this one matters. The weddings and the diagnoses and the goodbyes. And those days do matter, of course. But I am no longer sure they are where most of the real things happen.

Because here is what I keep noticing: the moments that have changed me most were almost never the ones I would have predicted. They were Tuesdays. They were errands. They were the conversations I almost talked myself out of, the detours I took for no reason, the mornings I dragged myself into when every part of me wanted to stay in bed. The sacred kept hiding inside the ordinary, and I kept nearly missing it because I was waiting for it to look more impressive than groceries.

We keep waiting for the burning bush. But most of the time, grace comes dressed as an ordinary Tuesday and a split grocery bag.

A different way of walking through your days

There's an old idea that we are met by what we are willing to show up for. That divine appointments are rarely marked on any calendar we can see, and that the only way to keep them is to keep showing up for the unremarkable hours — the meetings we'd rather skip, the routes we always take, the small kindnesses that cost us four minutes we thought we couldn't spare.

I don't say this to add pressure to your already-full days, as if now you must scrutinize every moment for hidden meaning and feel guilty when you miss one. That's not it at all. It's the opposite, really. It's a kind of relief. It means you don't have to wait for some grand, rare, perfect day for your life to count. The chance to be exactly where you were needed is woven into this very ordinary morning. It was probably woven into yesterday's too.

That woman with the oranges did something for me that she'll never know about. She reminded me that I am not just moving through my days — I am being placed in them. That the timing of my milk running out was not nothing. That someone, somewhere, is always one split grocery bag away from feeling completely unseen, and that I get to be the one who notices. We all do, more often than we realize.

For the one who almost stayed in bed

So this is my small invitation to you today: go on the walk. Make the call. Take the slightly longer way home. Not because you have to earn anything, and not because every moment must be heavy with purpose — but because the ordinary day in front of you may be holding something you cannot yet see, and the only way to find out is to show up for it.

You almost skipped this morning too, maybe. I'm glad you didn't. I'm glad you're here. Something in this perfectly unremarkable day may be quietly waiting for you — and you, dear one, may be exactly what it's waiting for.

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