When was the last time you felt tender? Maybe it was a small moment. A word that got stuck in your throat, an old grief showing up. Or maybe it was beauty rather than sadness, the way the moss between the trees shimmers after rain.

I can’t stop thinking about tenderness lately, although, most days I won’t let myself feel it. It seems too risky, too impossible. Better to keep the armour up, even though its growing heavy around my shoulders.

I wondered how I might find my way back and started how I always start: small. For the last three weeks, I wrote down moments that felt tender to me, that made me soft inside. Moments where I dropped my vigilance, my cynicism. Things like:

The deer in the forest the other day, further up the path, about to disappear into the undergrowth

The dog’s soft paws kicking against me in the night as she sleeps

The green spiky leaves of the holly bush, quietly moving in the wind

My two-year old nephew waking up from his afternoon nap, telling me about a dream he had: ‘You were in it,’ he says. ‘We went to the supermarket, Lena.’ ‘And what did we get,’ I ask. ‘Bread,’ he says, eyes wide open.

By and by, the moments became a collection of evidence, a cluster of meaning. A way to notice warmth.

This might sound terribly obvious but what is tender inside us must be held tenderly. I’ve tried for years to discipline and frighten my most vulnerable parts into submission, with no success. Which brings me to another curious feature of tenderness: it seems so intimately tied to failure. For days, I’ve wanted to write this piece here and tried to find the words. I must do it tenderly, I thought, otherwise what’s the point. Reader, I failed. In the last four hours, I wrote three alternative versions of this little essay and told myself they were dumb and deleted them and I didn’t have one kind emotion towards myself the whole time. That is, until about 5pm in the afternoon, when I was finally tender enough to relax a little. To not hold on so tight. To look at my scribbled list of tendernesses again and see what bloomed from there.

Tenderness cannot be hacked. I don’t think there’s a trick to it that makes it arrive faster. In that way, it resembles grief and joy. There is no shortcut, no timeline. Only our willingness to experience it, tenderly, and to be changed by its touch.