I say yes to Life. Unequivocally. Even in doubt. In every moment. I say yes.
Yes to pain. Yes to internal resistance. Yes to challenge. Yes to squirming discomfort. Yes to unhealthy soothing patterns if they rise up (again).
Yes to when I become defensive. Yes to reaction as it arises. Yes to the sharp sting of believing I have caused harm to others. Yes to the sharper sting of believing I could have prevented it.
Yes to illness when it rolls in. And yes to the desperate longing to heal and feel better.
Yes to hard-learned boundaries. Personal guardrails. Data. Science. Spirit. Yes to every possibility that refuses to be neatly categorized.
Yes to every opportunity, even when it arrives disguised as a problem.
And especially Yes to saying, “NO.”
Yes to “No, thank you,” being a complete sentence. Yes to honoring the body when “NO” is a conditioned or intuitive clench within it (and yes to when I can’t tell the difference between the two).
This is my yes.
More broadly, yes to the terrible things happening in the world. Not because I want them. Not because my whole being fails to recoil from atrocities. But simply because these events are happening. Now.
I say yes to a world on fire and meet it from a place of unconditional acceptance. Yes is the acknowledgment that in this moment, things are burning; they cannot be different right now. And yes to then taking action from this zero place.
So I say yes to knowing the moment is already gone. Already changing. Already becoming another. Continuing to be engulfed in flame, dying into a smolder, or actively being doused and quenched into hissing wet smoke.
Yes to the ceaselessly transforming nature of Life itself.
YES.