The Sun Never Says You Owe Me
On the mornings I forget that enough is already here.
Some mornings I wake up reaching.
Not for anything I can name exactly. It’s quieter than ambition and softer than longing. Something closer to — tenderness. A little more grace. From the world, maybe. Or maybe from myself. Some mornings I can’t tell which direction the reaching is going.
I have learned, slowly and not without resistance, that those are often the same thing. That what I reach for outward is usually what I have not yet offered inward.
Projection dressed as longing. Expectation wearing the face of need.
Somewhere in my late twenties, early thirties, I was going through what I can only describe as a quarter life crisis. The kind where the life you built starts to feel like someone else’s and you don’t know yet whose it should be instead.
I was reading A New Earth around that time. And somewhere in that same season, I came across a Hafiz quote for the first time. I don’t know if they arrived together or separately. What I know is that they landed in the same period of my life, when something was opening, and they became part of the same awakening.
The quote was about the sun. How the sun gives its light completely, endlessly, without keeping any account. It does not say to the earth: you owe me. It does not wait for gratitude. It does not withhold warmth from the ungrateful. It simply gives because giving is its nature. Because it cannot do otherwise.
I put the book down and sat with that for a long time.
Because I recognized, in the negative space of that image, everything I had been doing wrong. All the invisible accounting I had been keeping. The ways I gave and then quietly monitored whether the giving was returned. The tenderness I offered while part of me waited to see if it would be matched.
The sun never says you owe me.
That was the moment.
It took years to understand that insight in my mind. It took longer to understand it in my body. The understanding arrived through books and quiet reckonings. The remembering arrived somewhere else entirely…
I have been doing tai chi since I was young, on and off, the way you do something that was never really a choice — it was just what the mornings looked like in my family.
My first introduction was not graceful. My mother would pull me out of sleep by tugging my arms and legs, patting them down, telling me she wanted me to be tall. I was confused. I was half asleep. I pretended to resist.
But I looked forward to those mornings more than I ever said out loud. The warmth of her hands. The particular way she moved through the living room afterward — swinging her arms, patting her legs, unhurried, like the world had nowhere urgent to be. I didn’t have a name for what she was doing. I just knew it meant morning had arrived and she was there and everything was okay.
I miss those days now in a way that surprises me sometimes.
I am, for the record, five foot three. The tallest woman in the immediate family. So perhaps it worked.
My mother did this. Her mother before her. I watched it for years before I ever did it myself. It went into my body before my mind had a chance to evaluate it.
There are no words in tai chi. No journaling prompts. No framework. Just the body moving through a form that is older than anything I could have learned in a training room.
What I have noticed, returning to it recently, is that it does something the intellectual practices don’t quite reach. It doesn’t teach you that enough is already here. It makes you feel it. The slowness. The weight of your own body moving through space. The breath arriving without being asked for.
You cannot rush tai chi and remain in it. The form requires you to be where you are.
That is the practice underneath the practice. Not the movements. The returning.
I still have mornings where the wanting is loud. Where the gap between where I am and where I imagined I would be feels wider than usual. Where I want more — more recognition, more certainty, more of whatever it is that would make the reaching stop.
I do not think those mornings will disappear entirely. I am not sure they should. The wanting is part of what keeps me moving. The question is only whether it is driving or whether I am driving it.
On the mornings I do tai chi, I remember.
Not because the movement teaches me anything new. Because it returns me to something I already know and keep forgetting. That the body is here. That the breath is here. That my mother moved through this same form and her mother before her and something in that line of women knew, without being able to explain it, that the way through the hard mornings was not to acquire more but to return to what was already present.
Sometimes I find it in unexpected places too. In the people who love me well. My partner — the way they stretch in the morning, dance in the kitchen, pay careful attention to how my coffee is made. The attention that arrives before I know I need it. And something in me recognizes it. Home arriving quietly, through someone else’s hands, when I am not looking for it.
The sun never says you owe me.
I have been carrying that image for more than twenty years. It still does what it did the first time.
Some mornings I forget briefly that enough is already here. Some mornings I feel like I deserve more.
And then I do tai chi. I think of my mother. I think of her mother.
And I remember that the most radical thing I can do on a morning when the wanting is loud is to slow down. To move through the form. To let the body remember what the mind keeps forgetting.
That enough is already here.
