Sometimes I think about all that we've endured and survived, and it takes my breath away.

Because it's never survived by all of us, is it?

We're the planes that made it home from war, riddled with bullet holes on less-essential parts.

We say to ourselves, look how resilient we were!

As if everyone cut down just wasn't resilient enough.

We're not still here because we're any better than the people we've lost.

But we *are* here, facing the next test, and the next.

And that has to be enough.

(I know we're still a month off from the two-year anniversary of Russia's invasion, but it's all just hitting me very, very hard today, how much this world of ours is committed to compounding hardship with more hardship. Active cruelty and callous indifference aren't the sum total of all that we can do in this life - but they are terrifically *loud* parts of the human experience all the same.)