Finding That One Smile Is Worth It
Sometimes, noticing the simplest, smallest reasons to smile, wherever they find us in life, is enough to keep going.
8/28/20262 min read
Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up a habit that was never really ours.
We learned to meet good news with a pause. A quiet let's not jinx it. We learned this not because we felt it, but because someone else did someone who said it and moved on, while we stayed behind, turning it over and over.
Is that really how it works? Is that really what happened to me?
Festivals have a way of surfacing this. All the noise, the lights, the reasons to celebrate, and somewhere underneath, an old reflex asking us to brace instead of open.
Today, I wanted to try something different.
Celebrate the small wins, and let them attract the bigger ones.
Not as a slogan. As an intentional effort to live in today without the fear of losing it tomorrow. Here's the logic, simply put.
We're each given the tasks we're good at, as kids among siblings, in classrooms among friends, at work among a team. Roles find the people who can hold them.
Why would it be any different at a larger scale?
If I know how to celebrate life fully, maybe I notice more reasons to celebrate. And if I become really good at cribbing, worrying and crying even when there isn't a reason in that moment, maybe that becomes what I keep finding too.
I still believe some seasons are meant to test us, to keep us grounded, humble, and aware of what we're not in control of. That belief hasn't left. It sits right alongside this one, not against it.
And I understand pain more than most people who know me would guess.
But today, I wanted to make one small shift.
To look for the reason to celebrate, the way a festival asks us to, not because there's nothing to grieve, but because grief and celebration have never actually been opposites.
My brother is miles away today, and I felt that distance sharply.
There were tears.
But for the first time, they weren't the old tears, the ones that came from being angry he wasn't here, or from slowly going quiet on him instead of saying so.
Today, the tears came from somewhere else entirely.
From remembering us as kids, making a mess of everything, fighting with each other and for each other in the same breath.
Those were tears of love. And I let them stay exactly that.
Maybe that's the small win worth naming today. Not that the sadness disappeared. But that I finally let it sit next to the joy, instead of in place of it.
Somewhere in the pile of things that feel heavy, there is one small smile.
It might be hard to find, like a needle in a haystack.
But a needle is still there.
You find it because you choose to believe it's there. And because you're willing to look.
Maybe celebrating anyway isn't about having a life without darkness... Maybe it's about refusing to believe that darkness is all there is.