Is a life endured, a life well lived?

At first glance, the answer should be ‘no’.
Because endurance sounds like: breathing without joy, shadows of living, mechanical continuation, bare survival, and a refusal to collapse.
If you try to look deeper, beneath the fatigue and desperation, endurance is not the absence of life. Endurance is at the root of life.

Enduring means refusing to surrender your consciousness to nothingness. It’s what keeps a seed alive underneath the snow.
Though the seed isn’t blooming, but its alive, waiting for the spring.
You may think you are just surviving, but in the deep crevices of your psyche, something is still breathing, waiting and dreaming. This too is living, quiet and in darkness, but still full of potential.

You have endured without reward, applause and support. But what endurance does is, it protects you from disintegrating.
If you hadn’t endured and had collapsed entirely, there would be no you left to reflect on this. No consciousness left to feel the weight of living.

Meaning can only arise after you have endured the storms and held the ground for long enough. You’ve been keeping a candle lit in a room where no one’s watching. {Mujh se ankhen milaye kon, main tera aina hun; Mera diya jalaye kon, main tera khali kamra hun}

You endured, because you loved life, despite everything. Because to endure means you didn’t leave, didn’t give up. You stayed and bore it all. Despite the betrayal, the pain, the hollow mornings, the body that refused to cooperate, you still stayed.
This is love. You are love.

But endurance alone is not enough. At some point, endurance must transform, must give way to growth. You endured enough to arrive and now you must give yourself permission. Permission to thrive.

Your years of endurance were not dead time. You were not merely surviving. You were preparing, though unknowingly, for the possibility of a life, that could finally hold joy without breaking under it.
The tree doesn’t apologize for being a seed.