Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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The storm has passed. Everything lies still and white. I stare into my garden, caught in a feeling I can’t name. All that bloomed is buried – lush lilac, honeysuckle, mint, and sweet cherry tomatoes – every trace sealed deep beneath the frost.
Freezing rain glazes the soft snow like the shell of a crème brûlée. The branches of the redbud tree are bare. A clear lining of ice has replaced the short pink flowers yet to bloom. It’s eerie how the ice covers the nakedness of the branch, draping it in a delicate, shining veil.
The blizzard was brutal. Snow tumbled in heavy, unmelting chunks. Strange, how something capable of infinite, delicate patterns chose to fall as one indistinct mass. The snow has flattened everything, anonymizing it. And then, I see it. Amid the white expanse, a flash of blue.
It is my blue shovel. I stuck it in a drift after the first storm in some half-finished gesture. The snow swept in so relentlessly that shovelling felt pointless. Since then, the drifts have only risen. Now the shovel is almost completely encased. And yet, there it stands, perfectly upright. It has, against all odds, held its place, as if to say: you were here, and you intended to return.
I had a hard time connecting with our baby until one long lonely night in the NICU
Maybe that’s why the sight of it moves me so deeply. I have been feeling buried myself – by illness, by isolation, by the quiet ache of a life going nowhere. I gave up so much in pursuit of writing: relationships, ambition, even my own well-being. But when the time came, I couldn’t write. I was too sick, too sad, too damn lonely.
Looking at the shovel, I saw it buried by the very snow it was meant to clear. Something in that felt uncomfortably familiar. I’ve spent years trying to shape a life I could be proud of, only to feel buried by the work of becoming it. And yet, in a passing glance, my blue shovel revealed what I long overlooked. Sometimes the only thing keeping you upright is the thing you never managed to lift. What carries me forward is the strange symmetry between the ache of who I’m not yet, and the pull of who I could become.
Suffering doesn’t just weigh us down. It holds us long enough to endure. The ache becomes a kind of scaffolding: a secret foundation that keeps us from falling apart. When joy dims and numbness settles in, suffering keeps you still – even when it hurts to stay. It reminds you there’s something left to feel, that something mattered. It teaches you to value the days that hurt less.
Few accounts of suffering have unsettled me as much as the writing of Viktor Frankl. He describes caring for a young woman in a concentration camp, her strength nearly gone. Through the small window of her hut, she could see a single branch of a chestnut tree, and on it, two blossoms. “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness,” she said. She spoke to it often. And when asked if it ever replied, she answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here – I am life, eternal life.’”
What she endured lies far beyond my comprehension. I’m left humbled by her resilience – by the miraculous survival of light in a place determined to extinguish it. How could anyone in such ruin find even a trace of meaning? That courage escapes all measure. That said, it leaves me believing it’s possible. She taught me that acceptance is staying with what hurts and still turning toward the smallest sign of life – even a lone blossom on a hollowed branch.
After a road trip on the Dempster Highway, I’m ready for more adventures in my 60s
Maybe we ask too much of the truth, expecting it to heal what it only exposes. We tell ourselves that once everything is explained and there’s nothing left to resist – the pain will disappear. It doesn’t. It just softens enough to bear.
That is the burden of awareness: it strips away the bandage without healing the wound. That’s what it means to be human. To be torn between solitude and belonging, between wanting everything and needing nothing.
Suffering isn’t meant to be solved like a riddle, but witnessed like a season. It’s not about the absence of pain, but the presence of something else: the hush after the storm, the shimmering veil of icy branches, the flash of blue in the snow.
Soon, the snow will melt, the lilac will bloom again, and the shovel will survive yet another season. Not because the world is kind, but because it keeps going.
Arash Sharma lives in Montreal.