For the first time since nearly the beginning of time – this new world, that is – I slept until the alarm. Like my old life, I negotiated with God and hit the snooze. What a simple gesture – hitting the snooze – so normal and routine in the other world, so rare and precious in this one. Deep gratitude welled in my warm, heavy body; my body remembered the feel of hitting the snooze even more than my mind remembered, that when the alarm rang five minutes later, I begrudgingly sat up and turned it off. The day is beginning, like it or not. So familiar. Just like in this new world, the day is beginning, like it or not. More chaos and questions, like it or not. More hidden opportunities to love, like it or not. It seems like nothing is my choice in this new world, but that’s not true – I can choose to see the glorious daffodils as well as the headlines, consciously breathe in the strangely clean air. I can choose to be conscious of beauty as well as chaos, to recognize that chaos does not have a monopoly. It thinks it does; sometimes I think it does, too. But then I choose to focus, for a deep moment, upon the striking joy of the cardinal’s call, the slow breath in my lungs, of hitting the snooze.

© Meisaan Chan