Have you heard the unhurried footsteps of happiness creeping around the garbage cans out back?

Today flowed into so many unexpected joys. Five of us travelers united in the haphazard way travelers do and we bused and hitchhiked to Phyang Monastery.

And it wasn’t the beauty of the Himalayas, on the pleasantly long walk there. It wasn’t the art at the temple. It was the way we seamlessly fit into each other‘s company. It was how the oldest monk was so happy to have us at his monastery and invited us in to drink butter tea. It was how afterwards I broke off from the crew and ate a magnificent meal of thali. How then two smiling men in the street gave me a gift of tulsi tea—helluva a gift for one just off to make some tea!

It was how as I was basking in the afterglow of that gift, two construction workers accosted me with smiles and showed me they were wearing friendship bracelets I had given them the day I arrived in Leh, Ladakh.

It was how when I made it back to my guest house garden and drank jasmine tulsi tea, I smiled at the day. It was how it felt to be thankful for all the simple joys I’d found along its way. It’s how I can pen these words after three years. How I can fill a few pages in a journal without much neck pain. It’s how the memory of that pain makes me think more about how each word matters.

It’s how a friend died and in thinking about him I looked up from my life and saw all my friends and family still living and how much each moment with anyone matters. It’s how we have so much love we can still offer each other in so many ways. It’s how no one can stop me from quietly ending this day with a pen in hands, tea on table, listening to birds, waiting for the moon and her friends, inhaling the cooling air of a day well spent and welcomed reflection slow dancing in my mind.

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