There are seasons when I let life wash over me. When I become so porous to everything around me that I forget I was ever a shape of my own. I absorb the mood of a room, the weight of the news, the offhanded comment, the weather. I respond. I accommodate. I let life happen to me.
But what about the moments I happen to it?
What about the mornings I enter a space and shift the atmosphere just by being rooted? The days I wear green on purpose. The times I decide to speak when silence would be safer. The nights I choose joy even when grief is within reach. That’s what it means to happen to life.
The seed for this reflection was planted by Eloghosa Osunde’s essay Walking Worthy, where they write of choosing to happen to life as it happens to me, a phrase that has cracked me open in the best way.
It’s a way of inhabiting your agency and a refusal to only ever be in reaction.
To happen to life is to move first. To wear what calls to you before you ask if it’s appropriate. To reach out before you’re certain you’ll be received. To paint your face as a declaration. To name what you need without waiting for permission.
Life will still happen to you. It will shake you, stretch you, change you. But you can meet it with equal weight. You can answer back.
Sometimes, that answer is quiet.
Other times, it’s bold.
Notice: makeup, movement, style, voice, presence are accessories to our lives and ways we declare ourselves. Ways we claim authorship in a story we didn’t entirely write, but one we still get to co-create.
Today, I invite you to find one small way to happen to life.
Pick the lipstick that makes you feel dangerous. Say yes before you overthink. Choose the color, the robe, the playlist, the path that feels like yours, even if it isn’t practical.
Because life isn’t just something to survive or respond to.
Sometimes, you get to shape it.