What This Day Teaches

Wrapped in my softest clothes, my mama’s scarf around my neck, which I imagine still carries her scent, the sun wakes my sleepy skin. As I slowly inhale my morning coffee, my eyes rest on the Alpine landscape, tinted in glacier blue and pine shadow.

I notice the silence. Only birds singing a gentle song, the soft flap of wings as two Alpine choughs pass my balcony. It’s the first morning this winter that I begin the day on Balkonien, the pen gliding over my journal, trying to savour this moment.

Tomorrow I am turning 34.

It’s my third birthday, celebrated with the mountains. And my third birthday since I moved away from home.

Letting the years pass through me, I believe there was a reason life kept me in Berlin much longer than I ever intended. So I could cross paths with the love of my life and step into this adventure together.

Today also marks eight years of camaraderie, eight years of practising unconditional love.

There is so much we have already lived, and so much still lying ahead of us.

We came here with a plan, the first draft of a business plan written, but as Rumi says, the path appears when you start walking. And so, step by step, as we move forward, the next corner slowly comes into view.

As I wrote about in my last newsletter, the days of doubt still visit me. Days when I question whether I’m moving forward at all, when I feel as still as the mountains that now protect me. Uncertainty remains a guest whose presence I am slowly getting used to.

It’s not clarity or confidence that keeps me going in moments of cloudiness and fog.

It’s the one thing I have learned over the last few years: commitment.

Commitment to the part of me that feels like a lion in a cage, impatient like Simba waiting to be king.

Commitment to the woman I am becoming, the one who doesn’t just imagine a life, but slowly builds it.

Commitment to practising unconditional love, as labour, as action, as choosing each other again and again.

And commitment to a future. To the idea that one day there might be a child observing how we live, love, and create.

Until very recently, I used to think commitment followed confidence. That you first believe in yourself, and then you act.

Now I know that it is the very opposite.

Confidence grows out of action.

So I keep showing up for a vision without guarantees. We made a choice, and we are standing by it, even on days when doubt is louder than belief.

Living in the isolation of the mountains, away from the familiar structures that once held me, there is nowhere to hide. No social life to find distraction in. What remains is the question of whether I am willing to take responsibility for my own life.

It’s a responsibility that sometimes feels ordinary.

And looks like making small decisions consistently.

I am learning that commitment is not a restriction, but an act of care.

Care for the life you want to build.
Care for the people you want to share it with.
Care for the communities we live in.
Care for the future we are creating through everyday choices.

As I turn 34, I am proud of myself. Much of the mountain work is internal, but I’ve realised I’m not only doing it for me. I’m doing it for the people I think of every day, for those I’m building this life with and for.

And maybe that, more than the number itself, is what I am celebrating today.

With love,
Zaza