I kept waiting for the moment I would feel better. It never arrived as a moment. It arrived as a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and then a walk in the rain.
I had a very specific idea of what healing would look like. There would be a moment. A shift. Something would click into place and I would feel it — the way you feel a door finally unlocking after you’ve been trying the wrong key.
That moment never came. What came instead was a Tuesday morning when I noticed I had made tea without thinking about whether I deserved to. What came was a walk with Daisy where I looked up at the sky instead of at my feet. What came was a laugh — a real one, surprised out of me — at something she did with a stick.
“Healing is not a destination. It is a direction.”
Healing, I have come to understand, is not a destination. It is a direction. You don’t arrive at it. You just keep walking toward it, and sometimes you look back and realise you’ve covered more ground than you thought.
Daisy has been my walking companion through all of it. She doesn’t know she’s been doing therapy. She thinks she’s been doing walks. Maybe that’s the same thing.
The rain doesn’t bother her. She walks through it the same way she walks through sunshine — with the same complete commitment to the next smell, the next corner, the next small discovery. I have been trying to learn that. To be as present in the difficult weather as in the easy kind.