Tenderness, where are you?

I wait for tenderness to arrive without announcement, the way morning light creeps across a bedroom floor. It’s in the pause before speaking when someone you love looks tired, the instinct to lower your voice without thinking. It lives in the space between intention and action, soft as the moment before sleep. 

I am starving for tenderness in a world that has forgotten how to be gentle. 

At work, they call it efficiency. Everything is optimized, streamlined, maximized for productivity. We speak in bullet points and action items, reducing human complexity to measurable outcomes. Emails arrive marked “URGENT” about things that will be forgotten next week. We have meetings about meetings, deadlines that breed new deadlines, and I sit in my gray cubicle under fluorescent lights that hum like angry insects, wondering when caring became inefficient. 

Sometimes I stand in the grocery store and watch people move through the aisles like sleepwalkers, earbuds in, faces blank, grabbing items from their lists with mechanical precision. I want to stop them, shake them gently, ask when was the last time someone touched their face with love, when was the last time they sat in silence just to hear their own breathing. But instead I grab my own necessities and join the checkout line, trapped in the choreography of disconnection. 

The news is a relentless parade of cruelty - wars and violence, politicians who speak in soundbites designed to divide, climate disasters that make the future feel like a threat instead of a promise. I turn it off but the knowledge lingers, the weight of a world that seems to have misplaced its capacity for mercy. Even the weather app sounds aggressive; severe thunderstorm warnings, excessive heat advisories, winter storm watches. Everything is excessive, severe, warning. 

I remember tenderness like a language I never learned fluently. The way I used to brush my daughter's hair before school (she no longer needs or wants my help). How my neighbor would talk to himself as he planted carrot and sunflower seeds (we no longer live next to each other). The way my friends used to hug without rushing, how conversations could meander without purpose, how silence could be comfortable instead of something to fill (my days are too busy for these moments now). 

Now I hoard small moments of softness like a refugee. The stranger who holds the door without checking their phone. The way morning light sometimes falls across my bookshelves, creating a pocket of peace in the chaos. I ration these moments, make them last, because I never know when the next one will be. 

I dream of tenderness the way people in deserts dream of water. I imagine hands that touch without taking, voices that speak without demanding, spaces where I could be tired without being weak, where I could feel deeply without being broken. I hunger for conversations that move slow as honey, for embraces that last long enough to mean something, for the luxury of being seen without being judged. Sometimes, late at night as the world finally exhales, I practice tenderness on myself. I make tea slowly, run showers that are too hot, read poetry that has nothing to do with productivity or improvement. I speak to my reflection the way I wish the world spoke to me - with patience, with forgiveness, with the understanding that being human is hard work and we’re all just trying to make it through. 

I want to live in a world where crying is allowed, where rest isn’t earned but given, where we touch each other’s lives with the reverence reserved for precious things. A world where tenderness isn’t seen as weakness but as the bravest thing we can offer - the willingness to stay soft in a place that keeps trying to make us hard. A safe haven with the one that will never threaten that. 

Until then, I carry my hunger like a compass, pointing always toward the possibility of gentleness. I practice small rebellions of care: I smile at the person walking their dog (even when I see they didn’t pick up their poop). I let people merge in traffic (sometimes not so gracefully, but I still do it). I say please and thank you. I try to understand. To be patient. To say what I mean in the most honest way I can muster. I choose softness even when it’s not returned, because maybe tenderness is contagious. Maybe if enough of us stay hungry for it, we can starve out the harshness. 

Maybe the world doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe we’re just forgetting how to be gentle, and forgetting isn’t the same as losing forever. Tonight I’ll fall asleep to the sound of rain and wind against my window and I’ll pretend it’s the world trying to remember how to whisper.