There are times, amid the repetition of ordinary days, when we find ourselves wishing for something extraordinary to happen. Something that might change our lives all at once. Winning the lottery. Finally solving a problem that has weighed on us for years. Moments like these are rare. But stretch that single extraordinary moment across time, and before long it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary life itself, like a rainbow whose edges have faded until they disappear into the sky. Perhaps we move through miracles every day without recognizing them for what they are.
My father came to Germany after completing the 33-day Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. It was his first time visiting the city where I now live, and I wanted to fill his stay with memories worth keeping. One of them was a trip to the Dolomities, a place he had dreamed of hiking for decades.
I’m not someone who enjoys traveling with a carefully planned itinerary. I much prefer leaving room for adventure, following whatever unexpected discoveries the day happens to offer. But this wasn’t just another trip. I felt responsible for making it a meaningful one for my father. Whenever I found a spare moment, I caught myself studying maps, comparing routes, and looking for a better trail than the one I’d found the day before.
Traveling has always been one of my greatest joys. Packing for it, however, remains one of my greatest miseries. Every trip begins with the same impossible puzzle: how to keep my bag as light as possible while somehow making room for everything I might need. I finally finished packing at two in the morning and left for Munich Central Station a few hours later.
Then, from the very first train, everything began to unravel. Delays rippled through the schedule, one reservation collapsed after another, and only after setting off did I realize that I had brought my German residence card but had absentmindedly switched bags at the last minute, leaving my passport behind. After a brief moment of panic, I did the only thing I could. I Improvised. Friends rushed to Munich with my passport, and somehow I managed to board the last direct train to Brennero just ten seconds before the doors closed. Ironically, had that train arrived on time, I would have missed it entirely.
By the time we had changed trains, boarded another bus, and finally reached our accommodation, it was nearly nine in the evening. Rain was still falling in steady sheets. We had spent almost twelve hours simply getting there. A full day of a four-day trip gone before it had really begun.
I was one the verge of panic, but my father kept reassuring me. “It’s alright,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” I felt terribly guilty. He was the one who had endured the exhausting journey, yet he was the one comforting me. There was no point dwelling on everything that had already gone wrong. All we could do was make the most of the time we still had.
That night, after my father had gone to bed, the rain grew heavier. I switched on a single lamp and opened the book and journal I had brought with me. The forecast promised another fully day of rain, and I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Yet the moment I opened my book, something inside me softened. In a town I had never been to before, reading and writing with the sound of rain outside felt like a small luxury.
The forecast turned out to be exactly right. It rained without pause the entire next day. We wandered through the village, visited a small museum, and made our way along the Vallunga Valley, where the lower elevation spared us from the worst of the weather. That evening we cooked dinner together. While my father enjoyed a quiet soak in the bathtub, I opened my journal once again. I slowly replayed the conversations we had shared throughout the day, then ended the entry with a single sentence.
“Rain or shine, simply being here with my father feels like a miracle.”
On our last day in the Dolomities, the rain stopped as if it had never existed. The storm from the day before had left a generous layer of snow high in the mountains, laying an unexpected veil of winter over the middle of summer. We walked for as long as our legs were willing to carry us. then returned to the apartment in the late afternoon.
Before dinner, my father lay down for a short nap while I took a shower. With my hair still damp, I settled onto the balcony with my journal and a book. Two hours slipped by almost unnoticed. Sunlight, a gentle breeze, and birdsong were all the soundtrack I needed. I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting up the free travel brochures I’d collected, turning them into small collages, and lingering in the luxury of an unhurried day.
No matter what life brings, keeping a journal enriches the time I have been given. Most days, I simply write about how I managed to make it to the end of another day. But when I return to those pages months or years later, that ordinary day reveals itself in an entirely different light, becoming part of a much larger landscape.
My father returned to South Korea a month ago. While writing this essay, I opened the journal I kept in the Dolomities. Looking back now, I realize that simply sharing those days with him was a miracle. Not only on the bright, sunlit afternoons, but also on the days when rain poured relentlessly, on the days we mourned my mother, and in all the quiet moments when we leaned on each other and carried one another through.
Miracles whose outlines were too faint to recognize at the time.
So today, I continue to place both despair and joy into my journal, hoping that one day my future self will return to these pages and discover that this ordinary day, too, was beautiful in the way miracles often are. Looking back, it feels astonishing enough that I was given the chance to live through those moments at all. Perhaps, even now, we are walking through the midst of a miracle.
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