HERE’S TO LOOKING BACK

No matter what is missing, I hope you know this: you have what you need to live a beautiful story. Your story is rich in texture, color, history, and possibility.

Your own photographs are monuments to the reality that, all along, you were learning to come alive. Year by year, you were learning to breathe through each moment, one hour, one day at a time.

And perhaps being able to look back on your story in this way is a way of embracing your story. For perhaps, embracing your story doesn’t mean making sense of it all at once but about letting each chapter be what it needs to be. Looking back and noticing the ways you’ve changed and grown and how you will continue to do so.

So here’s to looking back. Here’s to looking back at old photographs and noticing what is beautiful. Here’s to looking at the edge of the photo and noticing where the sky was blue or the silhouette of a tree behind you and how, in photo after photo, sunlight found its way in, over and over again.

Here’s to realizing that when you look back on old photographs, you have two options: you can look back passively or with purpose. You can passively scroll through, hoping something beautiful finds you, or you can look back with purpose, saying this to yourself before you look at a single photo: “I am choosing to look for something beautiful that I’ve never noticed before.”

This is the moment you’re choosing not to look back and compare yourself to past versions of yourself. You’re deciding that this isn’t about finding a photo that’s worthy of sharing with others. This is a moment of choosing to connect with a part of your story that might otherwise have been forgotten or overlooked.

Keep looking closer.

Look again and again.

You never know

where you might find

the Light pouring in.

More in this week's series called "In Pursuit of a Hopeful Aliveness", only with a subscription in the Storyteller App.

More tomorrow…
Sincerely,
Morgan Harper Nichols
@thestorytellerco
@morganharpernichols