Somewhere beyond the reach of your present knowing
are things that will one day become beloved.

A song you have never heard
may someday belong so completely to a certain hour
that its first notes return you there at once.
A street you have never walked
may grow familiar beneath your feet.
There are rooms you have yet to enter
where, in time, you may feel entirely at home.

Someone whose name is still unknown to you
may one day become inseparable
from the shape of your days.

There will be laughter
whose sound has not yet entered memory,
conversations you will carry for years,
afternoons that pass almost unnoticed
and later become among the hours you cherish most.

Consider how much of what you love now
was once entirely beyond your knowing.

Every beloved place was once unvisited.
Every treasured friendship once had no history.
Every memory you return to with tenderness
was once merely an approaching hour,
indistinguishable from all the rest.

There is something exquisite in this:

that so much of what may one day matter deeply
is still unknown to you.

There are books you have not opened,
landscapes before which you have not yet stood,
traditions not yet begun,
small pleasures that may someday settle so naturally
into the texture of your life
that you scarcely remember their absence.

There are forms of happiness
for which you do not yet have a name.

You cannot know which ordinary day
will become unforgettable,
which unfamiliar place will become dear,
which unexpected meeting will quietly endure.

Perhaps that is reason enough
to remain receptive to what has not yet arrived.

Not because every day ahead will be beautiful,
but because some of what you will treasure most
has not yet entered your life.

There are joys for which you have no memory yet.

People you have not met.
Places you have not loved.
Moments that may one day seem impossible
to imagine having lived without.

And perhaps, years from now,
you will look back with wonder
at how much of what became precious
once existed entirely beyond your knowing.

For now, it remains just outside remembrance:

the familiar not yet familiar,
the cherished not yet cherished,
the moments not yet given meaning,

and all the beauty
you have yet to know.

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