This morning I painted a watercolor background.
I am relearning how to watercolor, which means I still have moments when the paper is much wetter than I intended and there is absolutely nothing useful to do except wait.
So I sat down on a cushion on the floor in a patch of sunshine and watched the paint dry.
Literally.
And almost immediately, my hand reached for my phone.
I didn’t need anything. I wasn’t expecting a call. I didn’t have a message to send or something I needed to look up.
There was simply a small vacancy in the day. My hands were empty. My mind was briefly unoccupied.
And apparently my body knows what to do with that now.
Pick up the phone.
I caught myself and thought:
Why am I here?
I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately.
Not always in the grand existential sense—although, obviously, there is that one too.
Why am I here? What am I doing with this life? What matters?
But lately I’ve been asking it in much smaller places.
I open social media for the forty-fifth time.
Why am I here?
I wander into the kitchen and open the refrigerator even though I’m not particularly hungry.
Why am I here?
I start browsing something online that I wasn’t planning to buy.
Why am I here?
There are plenty of other doors we might find ourselves opening automatically: the liquor cabinet, the pantry, the email inbox, the news, another episode, another scroll.
And sometimes there is a perfectly good answer.
I want a snack.
I need to send that email.
I have decided to sit here and look at ridiculous things on Instagram for ten minutes because that sounds fun.
Fine.
The interesting moments are the ones when the answer is:
I have no idea.
My hand simply arrived before my intention did.
And maybe that tiny question—Why am I here?—is one version of what I’ve come to think of as the Joy Pause.
The pause doesn’t tell us what to do.
It simply gives us enough time to notice what we are already doing.
And then we get to choose.
Maybe I close the refrigerator.
Maybe I eat the thing.
Maybe I put down the phone and look out the window.
Maybe I keep scrolling, but this time because I have decided that is exactly how I want to spend the next ten minutes.
The choice itself matters more than choosing the supposedly virtuous option.
I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps these tiny existential crises have something to teach us about the enormous one.
We tend to treat the question Why am I here? as though it requires one magnificent answer. A purpose. A calling. A reason for our existence worthy of engraving on a stone tablet.
But what if meaning is assembled much more quietly than that?
What if we build it by answering the smaller version of the question again and again?
Why am I here, on this app?
Why am I here, doing this thing?
Why am I here, giving this my attention?
And if the answer doesn’t feel like ours, perhaps we choose again.
Enough small choices made in the direction of what matters—connection, curiosity, health, creativity, rest, play, service, beauty, whatever matters to us—and maybe the larger question becomes a little less intimidating.
Perhaps we don’t discover the meaning of our lives all at once.
Perhaps we make our lives more meaningful by inhabiting the little moments more deliberately.
Anyway.
The paint is probably dry now.
And I know exactly why I’m here.
This is a topic we’ve been circling inside the Whole Woman Joy Circle lately. Want in on the conversation? Join us!
