What a Privilege

A reflection

What a privilege it is to be tired from a life you once dreamed of.

To sit inside an idea that was once only a sketch on paper. To look around and realise you are living the thing you used to pray for. There is a particular kind of tiredness that is not depletion at all. It is the good ache of building something real, and lately I have been noticing it with gratitude instead of complaint.

What a privilege it is to be surrounded by people who call you into your highest self. Who hold you accountable to your own truth as you grow. Who remind you who you are when you forget, and who celebrate your becoming instead of competing with it. Not everyone gets this. To be witnessed by people who want to see you rise is not a given. It is a gift.

What a privilege it is to choose. How you spend your time. Who you build with. Who you love. Who you become. So much of a life is shaped by choices we did not get to make, and to have arrived somewhere with real choices in my hands is not something I want to take for granted.

What a privilege it is to wake each morning with another breath. To walk through the world and see the humanity in every person I pass, each one carrying a story I will never fully know, each one at a different stage of their own becoming. The longer I live, the more the ordinary street feels full of quiet divinity, people healing, hoping, grieving, trying, all at once.

And what a privilege it is to help someone who can never repay you.

To buy the coffee. Share the meal. Open the door. Make the introduction. Offer the opportunity. Not because it will come back to you, not because they will ever call to say thank you, but simply because it is who you are. There is a freedom in giving that expects nothing. It is the difference between a transaction and a gift, and I want my life to be full of the second kind.

What a privilege it is to serve from overflow. To have done enough of your own inner work that your presence leaves people a little better than you found them, not because you are performing goodness, but because there is genuinely enough within you to share. That is what I am most interested in becoming now. Not someone with the most, but someone with enough to give freely.

Because the older I get, the more I realise that the richest people are not the ones who have the most. They are the ones who notice the most. The sunrise. The laughter. The long conversation. The quiet moment. The people. The simple things that were always there, waiting to be seen.

I used to think gratitude was something you practise. A thing you write in a journal, a box you tick. I do not think that anymore. Gratitude is not something we practise. It is something we become. It stops being a task and starts being a way of seeing, until the noticing is just who you are.

And perhaps that is the greatest privilege of all.

To be fully alive, and to know it while it is happening. Not looking back on it later, wishing you had paid attention. But here, now, awake to the whole of it, the light and the shadow, the tiredness and the joy, and grateful for all of it.

What a privilege. 🫶