I was sitting outside the town hall on a Saturday afternoon in Valencia, during the winter in the middle of January.

Once we pass the New Year and the celebration of the Three Wise Men in Spain, winter skies in January leave a gloomy aftertaste. Gone is the anticipation of the Christmas holidays. Broken are many resolutions people draft on the arbitrary date of January 1^st. Returning to our routine sometimes feels like waking up from a hangover.

And on this overcast Saturday in January, I had said goodbye to someone at the train station hours before.

As I looked up at the sky in my favorite plaza of Valencia, I felt like the sky mirrored how I was feeling.

Valencia is one of the sunniest cities in Spain, lined with palm trees and ornate architecture. But for the past few days, it had been blanketed in clouds, and the day before, rain.

Normally, the city center pulsated with life: tourists enjoying the beauty and novelty, and locals chatting for hours on terraces.

In January, however, the city has been a bit more sparse. Has it been because of the cold and the grey? The fewer hours of daylight? The return to the routine after indulging in sweets and personal savings during the holidays?

As I sat on that park bench, reflecting on all of this, I wondered when I would see the sun again. When I would see him again.

And then I noticed something.

The sky had been grey all day, grey as the lint you will find in a vacuum cleaner. But now, at the start of sunset, wisps of a very faint blue started to peak out in the clouds.

I still couldn’t see the sun. But the fact that a tiny hint of blue hue was seeping through the clouds lifted my spirits. I continued to look at the clouds, and I soaked in the moment at the plaza, outside the town hall.

I listened to the gentle roar of conversations. A song played from speakers on the other side of the plaza, and I wondered where I had heard that melody before. A tourist approached me and asked a question in English about the town hall.

And then I looked at the sky again. As the clouds continued moving, I saw very faint streaks of the deep blue sky that normally covers Valencia, a sky so blue that makes the city’s white architecture stand out even more.

The blue sky was always there, I thought. Which may not feel like anything profound. Of course the blue sky is always there. Of course clouds eventually move away. But the realization that I had was much more profound.

Sometimes it’s the simple things we take for granted that teach us the most moving lessons.

All day, I had identified with the clouds. They reflected my mood, the return to routine, and the winter, which, after Christmas, we’re already tired of.

But I had forgotten that the essence of the sky was not the clouds. It was the endless blue, stretching across the horizon. And even if it gets covered by clouds now and then, the blue is always there beyond the clouds.

I think this happens to us.

We are like that endless beautiful blue sky. But sometimes, we forget who we really are. We get covered in our own grey skies of stress, worries, insecurities, and so on. And then, we start to identify more with these transitory things. We start to worry that these things will last forever.

We become more focused on how to pay our bills, how to be more successful, how to make more money, how to survive the day, over and over again. We start to believe that this is all we are, and that this is all we’ll ever be. We forget bit by bit over time our true selves, and we leave behind our deepest desires and wishes. And sometimes, we even forget that they ever existed.

And that is when we start to feel lost. Because our dreams help craft who we are.

Ever since I was in third grade, I’ve dreamed of being a writer. That dream has never gone away. But over the years, that dream has gotten covered by the clouds in my life.

At one point during lockdown, I lost nearly all my money, and ate rice and ketchup for a week. When I pulled myself out of this period, my sole focus was survival and money. Money became a source of anxiety for me: how to find it, how to keep it, and how to spend less of it.

Next became the obsession for success. I wanted to prove that I was capable of making a difference and doing it on my own. I worked harder than I ever have in my life, and I was proud. But at the end of the day, I was too burned out to write anything. So I didn’t.

This became my identity for several years: survival and success. I’ve gotten a Master’s degree, passed on my expertise to hundreds of teachers, and had a positive impact on my students’ lives. But no amount of success or recognition was ever enough. And the books and poems I wanted to write laid dormant in my heart, longing to find life on paper.

We are all the blue sky that always will exist beyond the clouds. We are our childhood dreams, our hopes and desires. We are the books we want to write, the art we want to create, the friends and family we seek and keep close to us.

When we remember the blue sky within us, we are listening to our heart. And our heart always knows the way. We listen to it easily as a child, and some of us are wise enough to listen into adulthood.

But at some point – perhaps in a moment of crisis or change – we decide to stop listening to our hearts. We see the clouds looming above us, which seem ominous and prepotent. We fear the clouds will be there forever. And so, we choose to listen to the clouds, forgetting the sky was there first.

I see so many people going through the motions on autopilot. I’ve lived periods like that. These periods are like the quote from Henry David Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” While it’s important to focus on practical matters, I don’t think we’re meant to live only for that.

To anyone feeling lost right now, I would like to say this lesson that I learned from the clouds in Valencia:

You are not a cloud. You are a sky. You may have clouds in your life that may cloud your vision. Learn to deal with the clouds while they are there – and they will pass – but don’t let the clouds take away the focus from who you are. Honor who you are.

It’s scary to follow our hearts. They often tell us to go in directions that seem illogical. When I had almost no money and barely any food, it made no sense to stay in my apartment in Madrid. But deep down, my heart told me that I would be okay, things would get better, and that I was living a beautiful moment in my story, even if it didn’t feel that way at the moment. And soon, the clouds floated away and revealed a path I never could have known existed. One quote I came across in a podcast last week was, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Remembering that quote made me then look beyond the blue sky. Beyond the blue sky are the constellations that we admire, that people have used to guide them while traveling for thousands of years, that remind us that the sky is not everything. There is an entire universe out there. And we often underestimate our own potential and other possibilities.

I sat on that bench outside the town hall for a bit longer. Seeing the orange rays of the sunset wasn’t possible that day, but I did see rose colored tints in some of the clouds. I’ve always thought the clouds during sunsets in Spain look like cotton candy.

Eventually I walked home, reflecting on what the clouds taught me that day. What I learned was nothing groundbreaking. Anyone can open a self-help or philosophy book and read the same message. But it’s one thing to read and understand something; it’s another to feel it within.

On that afternoon, I reminded myself of how far I’ve come. I thought of the times I’ve trusted my heart to guide me where I needed to go. And I was reminded that, by honoring who I am, life will set the building blocks for my path in often the most unexpected ways.