A hand rests on your shoulder, and you don’t flinch. Something settles in, a warmth that needs no words, a quiet promise that you’re not doing this alone. In that simple weight, light on bone and cloth, there’s more comfort than a thousand careful sentences. Your breath slows. Your shoulders drop half an inch. You didn’t notice how high you’d been holding them.
That’s what I miss most, the miracle hidden in plain touch.
For more than 30 years, I worked as a surgeon. My hands often landed on shoulders and faces. I used touch to say what I couldn’t say out loud, right before anesthesia. I thought I understood touch.
Then I became the patient.
Hands on my shoulder (from Joyce, my sons, nurses who had seen too much) became a lifeline I didn’t know I needed. Each time, they said the same thing without speech: I’m here. You’re not doing this by yourself.
We don’t call that a miracle. We should.
Consider warm water.
Each morning, I turn a dial. In seconds, heat arrives, and I forget how strange that is. But if you stand in the shower and really feel it, you sense the work behind it. Pipes under frozen ground. People who planned, built, repaired. A quiet system that stays out of sight until the day it doesn’t.
Someone chose to make comfort possible. Someone decided warmth shouldn’t belong only to the lucky.
I watch steam rise and think of my grandfather heating water in kettles on a wood stove. Three generations later, warmth shows up on demand. I ignore it most weeks. Then the power goes out, and I remember. My gratitude comes back fast, like a reflex.
Electricity moves through the walls while I sleep. I flip a switch and the dark disappears. I plug in my phone and hear my sons’ voices from hundreds of miles away. I charge the device that helps me breathe at night. None of this feels dramatic while it works.
But it is.
Once, I sat in the dark for three days during an outage. No heat. No refrigerator. No small comforts to soften the edges. I had spent my whole life wrapped in this gift, and I only understood it when it vanished.
When the lights finally blinked back on, I stood in my kitchen and cried. It wasn’t only relief. It was recognition.
We live inside so many small miracles, and we stop seeing them.
Laughter is another.
Not polite chuckles, but the kind that bends you over and steals your breath. I’ve seen it in hospital waiting rooms, totally out of place and completely needed. It cracks tension like ice under a boot. I’ve felt it rise during chemo, sudden and absurd, as if my body refused to let fear have the last word.
Isn’t that a form of courage?
Laughter is the body pushing back. It costs nothing. It reaches places medicine can’t touch. And we make it ourselves, a private supply of relief, proof that we haven’t given up.
Your body repairs itself.
I tell medical students this and they nod, as if it’s ordinary. It isn’t. Cut your finger and watch what happens. Cells rush in. Blood thickens and seals the break. Skin pulls itself together. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t think it into being. Your body just knew.
I’ve sewn faces back together after trauma. I aligned what I could and placed the sutures. But the true repair happened without me. The body wants to be whole. It reaches for wholeness the way plants reach for light. Doctors learn to support that process, but we can’t command it.
That, too, is a small miracle.
Kindness from strangers belongs on this list.
A woman holds the door when your arms are full. A cashier smiles when you’re digging for your wallet. A driver lets you merge when you’re stuck. We brush these off as nothing. But they are something. They are threads that keep us tied to each other.
I think of a nurse during my second surgery. As they rolled me into the operating room, she took my hand and squeezed. “You’ll be fine,” she said. She didn’t know that. She offered it anyway, that small gift of steady presence. I still remember her.
How many times has someone done that for you?
I can speak and be heard. I can read signs and move through the world. I can choose what to eat, where to go, when to rest. These freedoms feel so basic that I forget they aren’t shared by everyone.
Somewhere, someone is fighting to speak without fear. Somewhere, someone would trade everything for the simple choices I make without thinking.
If you’re in treatment, choice can shrink. It can come down to one thing: take the next sip of water. Walk to the mailbox. Show up for the appointment. That counts. That is courage, too.
A hand on your shoulder. Warm water. Light in the dark. Laughter. Healing. Kindness. Voice. Choice.
These things deserve our attention. They don’t demand it.
I learned this the hard way. We miss miracles because we look in the wrong direction. We chase the big, loud, undeniable moments. All the while, quiet gifts keep showing up, and we’re too distracted to notice.
The sacred can look like a hand on your shoulder right now. A gentle warmth that says, without fuss, you are not alone. Not once. Not ever.
All you have to do is look.
