Diligent Candy

It’s spring again. The city wears green like a second skin, delicate and a little uncertain. Trees push out shy leaves, the wind smells of thawed dreams, and the light, so tentative at first, spills gold onto surfaces that had forgotten how to gleam. Everything is becoming.

And maybe—so am I.

I’ve been thinking lately about living softly. Not as weakness, not as retreat, but as choice. A deliberate turning away from sharpness, from noise, from the constant architecture of survival. Living softly is not about being untouched; it’s about learning to touch the world gently, after all the ways it’s scraped against you.

There are mornings now when I don’t rush. I watch the steam curl from my tea. I listen to birdsong like it’s being sung just for me. Sometimes, I write a sentence and don’t ask it to be brilliant. I let it breathe.

This gentleness is new. It feels like rebellion.

Marcel Proust once wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Spring, to me, is a training of the eyes. To see the old world again—as if it had been rewritten overnight in lilac and gold. To notice the invisible: how the garden begins with a whisper, how even sorrow stretches a little when the sun returns.

Living softly is a way of making time yield again. Of reclaiming the parts of life that do not scream for attention: the long pause before a thought, the echo of a page turning, the shadow of a daisy on skin.

I am not interested in rushing toward anything anymore. Not perfection. Not productivity. Not even healing. Spring reminds me: things bloom in their own time. And so will I.

So this season, I’m not striving. I’m noticing. I’m softening. I’m letting life approach, slowly—and perhaps, with grace.