I return to center,
Not because everything is settled,
But because I am not required to carry the whole world on my shoulders.
Returning to center is not escape,
It is honesty.
I return inward first,
To the place beneath the noise,
Beneath the headlines,
The expectations,
The unfinished conversations that loop in my mind.
Before I try to fix anything,
I choose to notice.
I name what I am carrying,
The tightness in my chest,
The shallow breath,
The quiet exhaustion I keep calling resilience.
Naming is not weakness,
It's the beginning of care.
I name the things I cannot control,
The choices of others,
The timing of outcomes,
The way stories unfold beyond my reach,
I loosen my grip,
Not because I don't care,
But because control has never been the same as love.
I name the urgency that lives in me,
The pressure to respond,
To decide,
To be certain before I'm ready.
Urgency often sounds like wisdom,
But it rarely feels like peace.
I return to center again,
To the place where my body reminds me that I am here,
Feet on the ground,
Breath moving in and out.
This moment asks nothing of me but presence.
I name the fear beneath the busyness,
The worry that if I stop everything will fall apart,
But the world has been spinning long before my striving,
And it will continue even as I rest.
I name my limits without apology,
I am one person,
With finite energy,
Finite attention,
Finite time,
Limits are not failures,
They're the shape of being human.
I return to center when my thoughts scatter,
When my heart feels pulled in too many directions.
Center is not stillness without movement,
It's movement that knows where home is.
I name the grief I cannot fix,
The suffering I cannot resolve,
The questions that refuse neat answers.
Some things are not asking for solutions,
Only witness.
I return to center as an act of trust,
Trust that I'm doing the one thing I can do,
Coming back to myself.
It's not selfish,
But faithful.
I name what is mine,
This breath,
This body,
This response,
This moment of choosing how I will be present and everything else can wait.
I return to center,
Not once,
But again and again,
Each return,
A small refusal to live only at the edges of myself.
I return to center and find that it holds,
Not because the world has changed,
Because I have remembered where my work truly begins.
I return to center,
The one place I can always come back to,
The one practice no one can take from me,
The one faithful act that remains possible,
Even when nothing else feels certain.
I return,
And in returning,
I am enough for this moment.
