“No resolutions or expectations?” he questioned, not in judgment but, from want to continue conversation.
“No,” she smiled with an open lightness of spirit.
“What about hopes?” he asked.
Her smile held. “There are always hopes,” she spoke, “but, those, I leave to the will of the Universe—your God—whatever we choose to call It. I have no expectation they will come true, but should they live…” Her thoughts trailed without spoken finish.
Her eyes searched the world, the faint snow melting beneath clear sky blue and green grass rising, still growing, in the midst of a mild winter.
“Why should we hold to expectations?” she asked. “Can not expectations undermine experience? Something great lives, but we look only to the end, an end that maybe never happens, but in our forward focus, we take for granted all the good that IS when right before our eyes. With expectations, we get so fixed on a course that we forget to look around and see the beauty that surrounds us. Maybe to see the beauty, and not the action of traveling a fixed path, is the whole purpose of the journey—life!”
He listened to her every word, saying nothing that might disrupt her thoughts’ expression.
“Today shouldn’t be this beautiful,” she continued, “but it is! Should we be disappointed that it isn’t cold and dreary, and that, even with a touch of snow, the world is warm from a pure-sky sun? Today isn’t what it should be…GOOD! I want it as it is!” Her smile broadened with her spirit’s rising into lived elation.
The cool air rosed her cheeks and a soft breeze scattered her straight-falling hair. Only after her mind and spirit stilled—returning from transcendence—did he ask, “and us?”
Her demeanor held unchanged, but in her eyes, their centers deepened—not to shadows, but—to wonderings he could not read.
She took his hand, still smiling, and answered, “Don’t overthink it. Why should the Universe give sign if we do not trust and follow what is already within? If it feels right, maybe it is…and if not—we learn. We only learn by living.”
“Then that will be my resolution,” he replied.
“What?”
“To live.”
She took his hand, her face still rosed and spread in smile; and they walked together in the present beneath blue sky, upon green grass growing through melting snow’s last lingering of white, absent expectation, and filled with a gratitude for all that, in the moment, was.