How strange it is to be anything at all

There’s a silence that falls over you when life slows down. When the sky is painted with twinkling stars, the phone is out of reach, and the light outside your window is still on. In that stillness, you feel it. Not quite peace, not quite confusion, but something subtler, more haunting.

The awareness of being.

You have felt it before. Not in loud, climactic moments, but in the gentle ones. Like sitting alone after a long day. Or staring at your reflection and realising you have aged, but also that you have been here all along, watching your life happen from inside this strange, breakable body.

“How strange it is to be anything at all.”

That line, borrowed from a song that sounds like longing itself, has lived rent-free in my head for years. It returns usually when I least expect it. In the middle of a laugh. While doing my makeup. While drinking water. It lands gently, but it unsettles.

Because it is strange, isn’t it?

We wake up every morning, slipping into identities like old coats. Daughter, friend, coworker, dreamer. We remember passwords, eat toast, make plans. We worry about little things like unread emails and big things like being enough. And all the while, we carry a soul. Whatever that means.

Nobody asked us if we wanted to be here. And yet, here we are with beating hearts, strange memories, awkward hopes, and hands that can hold both grief and joy at the same time. We exist in this impossible middle space between the ordinary and the infinite.

What are the odds?

That atoms would dance in just the right way to form you. That out of millions of years and billions of possibilities, there would be a Monday morning where you wake up feeling like you are not quite real and yet somehow, more real than ever.

It is wholesome. Not sweet like fairy tales, but quiet like the truth. The kind of truth that makes you want to sit and listen to your own breathing. The kind that reminds you that you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to justify your existence. Being is already a marvel.

You are already part of the poetry.

And yet, we forget. We get caught up in the noise of traffic, deadlines, expectations, and comparisons. We trade wonder for efficiency, and curiosity for certainty. We forget that it’s okay to be a little lost. To not have answers. To pause and just look at the sky without trying to find a message in it.

Because sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is admit that you don’t know what you are doing. But you are here. And that’s something. And maybe that’s everything.

Maybe the goal is not to understand it all, but just to witness it. To be comfortable with the miracle of your own aliveness. To let yourself be awed at the fact that your heart beats without asking, your lungs breathe even when you are asleep, and your mind, chaotic as it may be, is trying its best to make meaning out of new generation lingo.

We are surrounded by herds of people who glorify purpose and progress, but it is radical to just be.

To sit. To feel. To notice.

To exist without needing to earn it.

How strange it is to be anything at all.