I have become, to my surprise, hooked on the FIFA World Cup.

It happened fast. One afternoon I turned it on for background noise and by the second half I was standing in my living room yelling at grown men in shin guards.

I have watched fans paint their faces and lose their voices for eleven strangers wearing their colors.

I watched a pack of Norwegian supporters take over a Mets game last week — flags, chants, the whole coordinated glory of it — while the Cubs quietly dismantled the home team in the background.

I have watched how much a single goal costs: the effort that goes nowhere, the shot that clangs off the post, ninety minutes of work for one moment that might not even come.

And I watched a match refuse to resolve itself in regulation or extra time, so it came down to five players, one at a time, walking alone to a spot on the grass while an entire stadium held its breath.

The announcers, for the record, have been a delight, equal parts poet and lunatic, which might be the correct way to describe most things worth watching closely.

But the part that has stayed with me longest isn't the drama or the noise. It's watching fans from other countries walk around this country and discover it isn't what they thought. Interviews with visiting supporters keep circling back to the same surprised, almost sheepish admission: This isn't what we expected. The people are kinder. The restaurants give free soda refills. RANCH DRESSING! Something they'd built in their heads for years quietly came apart and got replaced by something truer.

I think that's closer to how we come to know most things that matter, including whatever you call the mystery that holds the universe together. We arrive with a picture already assembled, often inherited, years old, and built more out of fear or old hurt than out of an actual encounter. And then something happens.

A conversation.
A kindness we didn't expect from a source we'd written off.
A grief that cracks the picture open.

And whatever we thought we knew has to make room for what's actually there.

That's not a loss. It's closer to how growth works. The sacred, if it's worth anything, was never going to fit neatly inside the picture we made of it at twelve years old, or the one we inherited from someone who was hurt and passed the hurt along. It keeps arriving, a little different than expected, and a little truer, if we let it.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you'd let something surprise you: a stranger, a stadium full of them, or the quiet mystery underneath it all showing up a little different than you thought. Let the old picture come apart if it needs to; a truer one will emerge. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa