As I sat down for dinner—slow-cooked chicken, diced tomatoes, fresh onions, peppers, garlic, oregano, black pepper, Himalayan sea salt, and a little honey a for just the right touch of sweetness—I was I scrolling through my newsfeed, half paying attention, looking for nothing in particular.
I’m reading about, A black seadevil anglerfish, one of those deep-sea creatures that never sees the light of day, had somehow surfaced off the coast of Tenerife, ( Tenerife, is in the Canary Islands, near Santa Cruz de Tenerife.). She had been filmed alive in daylight, something that almost never happens. And then, just an hour later, she was gone.
I don’t know if she meant to take that journey or if she was caught in something beyond her control. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she lost her way. Maybe she was chasing something—food, survival, instinct. But whatever the reason, it happened.
And in that moment, she experienced something no other anglerfish ever had—light, warmth, a world beyond her own.
She’s little—just 7 inches long, maybe the length of my hand. But she came from a world we will never know, a world 5,000 feet below the surface, where the water is cold, dark, and heavy.
We all experience moments in life where everything feels cold, dark, and heavy. Where the weight of things presses in from all sides, and it’s hard to breathe, hard to move, hard to even imagine something different.
We convince ourselves that staying where we are—where it’s familiar, even if it’s dark—is safer than taking the risk of reaching for something unknown. Because what if it’s worse up there? What if we don’t survive the journey? What if the light blinds us? What if we reach the surface and find that it wasn’t what we hoped for?
So if we scale her journey up to our world, it would be like a person climbing 10 miles straight up—almost reaching space—without a spacesuit, oxygen, or protection from the elements.
She endured crushing pressure shifts, brutal temperature changes, and a completely unfamiliar world (dating 2025🤪) and yet, she made it.
She made the journey alone. No other anglerfish will ever know what she saw, what she felt, what she experienced in those final moments. There was no one there to share it with. No one else to understand., that’s absolutely heart breaking.
Maybe things like this aren’t accidents. Maybe we don’t understand why they happen, but some moments are meant to be seen. Some journeys matter, even if they don’t last long.
How often do we stay in the cold, dark, and heavy parts of our lives because we’re afraid to reach for the light? How many times do we convince ourselves that we’re better off in the depths because at least we know what to expect?
What if the journey—no matter how impossible, no matter how terrifying—is worth making?
Because maybe, just maybe, her story isn’t just about what happened to her.
Maybe it’s about what we’re all capable of.