When Life Has Lost Some of Its Colour

When Life Has Lost Some of Its Colour

🌺 The Hummingbird Still Notices the Flowers

Nothing was particularly wrong.

Perhaps that was what made it so difficult to explain.

Life had simply become very full for a very long time. There had been work to finish, people to answer, responsibilities to carry and the endless small things that somehow multiply whenever nobody is looking.

Eventually the days began resembling one another.

Wake up. Get things done. Answer what needed answering. Remember what needed remembering. Fall into bed tired enough not to think too much about any of it.

There hadn't been some dramatic collapse or great moment of unhappiness. Somewhere along the way, life had simply become something to manage.

A few quiet days at a small guesthouse in the countryside were supposed to help, although the first morning didn't feel particularly transformative.

I made coffee and took it outside.

The veranda overlooked a slightly unruly garden where herbs, flowering shrubs and grasses had been allowed to grow with far less concern for order than most humans would tolerate. Morning light was only beginning to reach through the trees, and somewhere beyond the garden a bird called repeatedly into the cool air.

I sat there doing very little.

Then something tiny shot past.

At first I thought it was an insect. A moment later it returned and stopped almost impossibly in mid-air beside a cluster of flowers.

A hummingbird.

Its wings were moving too quickly to follow as it hovered beside one bloom, disappeared into another and then darted sideways before returning again.

I put the coffee down.

For the next few minutes, I watched.

And somewhere in those few minutes, something I hadn't realised had become quiet inside me seemed to wake up.

Not dramatically.

Just enough to think:

Look at that.

Sometimes, perhaps, that's where returning begins.

🌿 What the Hummingbird Has Always Known

Hummingbirds live extraordinarily energetic lives. Their rapid metabolism demands frequent feeding, and much of their day is spent moving between flowers in search of the nectar that helps sustain them.

What fascinated me that morning wasn't simply the speed.

It was the attention.

The garden was enormous compared with the bird, yet it moved directly towards what could nourish it. One flower, then another, each tiny encounter giving it what it needed before it continued.

The hummingbird wasn't asking the whole garden to become extraordinary.

It was finding what mattered within it.

Perhaps humans need that reminder sometimes.

Especially when life begins to feel strangely colourless.

🌿 What It Quietly Reminded Me About Being Human

There are seasons when we don't feel particularly unhappy.

We simply stop feeling much of anything strongly.

We still laugh when something is funny and show up where we're needed. We make dinner, answer messages, remember birthdays and continue doing the things that make a life function.

From the outside, everything can look perfectly fine.

But somewhere beneath all that functioning, curiosity becomes quieter. The things we once looked forward to stop pulling us towards them quite as strongly, and we realise we haven't felt genuinely delighted by anything in a while.

When that happens, we're often tempted to search for a large answer.

Maybe we need a new job. A holiday. A different routine. A major change. Something big enough to make life feel vivid again.

Sometimes change genuinely is needed.

But watching that hummingbird made me wonder whether our way back to life always begins with something enormous.

Perhaps sometimes it begins with noticing what still reaches us.

🌿 The Ancient Wisdom Hidden Among the Flowers

The hummingbird moved through the garden without needing every flower.

It found one.

Then another.

There was something unexpectedly comforting about that.

When we've felt disconnected for a while, we can put enormous pressure on ourselves to feel better. We think we should be more grateful, more excited, more enthusiastic about a life we know contains good things.

But emotions rarely respond well to being ordered around.

Perhaps instead of demanding that we fall wildly back in love with life, we can become curious about the moments when something inside us quietly responds.

The first sip of really good coffee.

Warm sun on your face after days of rain.

A dog doing something gloriously ridiculous.

A song you haven't heard in years.

The smell of the ocean before you can see it.

A conversation that makes you forget to check your phone.

None of those moments needs to transform your life.

Maybe they only need to remind you that you're still here inside it.

🌿 A Different Way to See Today

Perhaps feeling alive isn't something we either possess or lose.

Maybe it is something we continually reconnect with.

Life asks a great deal from our attention, and modern life has become particularly skilled at scattering it everywhere. There is always something demanding to be read, answered, watched, fixed or worried about.

When enough of our attention is consumed by what requires us, very little remains for what restores us.

That doesn't mean we've become ungrateful.

It may simply mean we've stopped noticing what nourishes us.

The answer isn't necessarily to make every day extraordinary.

Perhaps it's to become available to ordinary things again.

🌿 A Question to Carry

The hummingbird disappeared from the garden almost as suddenly as it had arrived.

For a moment I waited for it to return.

It didn't.

The garden simply became a garden again, the coffee had gone slightly cold and the morning continued exactly as mornings tend to do.

But something had changed.

I was paying attention now.

I noticed tiny drops of water along the leaves. The smell of the coffee. Sunlight beginning to reach the far side of the garden. A breeze moving through the grasses.

None of it had appeared because of the hummingbird.

It had been there all along.

And that left me with a question:

What still makes something inside you quietly say, “Look at that”?

Perhaps that's worth noticing.

🌿 One Small Step Forward

You don't need to make yourself feel happier today.

And you don't need to create a perfect morning, book a retreat or turn noticing beautiful things into another worthy habit you have to perform correctly.

Simply pay attention to one moment that reaches you.

Something that makes you smile before you think about smiling. Something beautiful enough to interrupt you for a second. Something funny, peaceful, delicious, interesting or unexpectedly kind.

When it happens, stay with it slightly longer than you normally would.

Not because it needs to mean anything profound.

Simply because your attention has found something worth resting on.

That matters.

✨ Soulful Wisdom

The hummingbird returned the following morning.

I wasn't waiting for it, which somehow made its arrival even better.

This time it appeared near another part of the garden, hovering briefly amongst a cluster of flowers before darting towards the trees.

The encounter lasted less than a minute.

But I noticed it.

And perhaps that was the real gift.

Nothing about my life had changed overnight. The responsibilities were still waiting, the unanswered things remained unanswered and whatever had made life feel so full hadn't magically disappeared.

Yet the world seemed to contain a little more colour than it had the day before.

Maybe life hadn't become dull.

Maybe I had simply become tired enough to stop noticing some of it.

There are seasons when finding our way back to ourselves requires courage, difficult decisions and genuine change.

But not every return begins with a revolution.

Sometimes it begins with coffee on a veranda.

A patch of morning light.

A ridiculous dog.

A song remembered.

A tiny bird hovering beside a flower.

Perhaps the hummingbird's ancient wisdom is not that we should ignore everything difficult and search for something pretty instead.

It's that even while life is demanding, complicated or ordinary, small sources of nourishment still exist.

And when you've been running on empty, small doesn't mean insignificant.

So don't demand that life amaze you today.

Just notice what reaches you.

Then notice another thing tomorrow.

Perhaps falling in love with being alive again happens like that.

Not all at once.

But one small flower at a time.🌺