The Weight of a Smile
I spent this morning trying to fix a broken drawer in the kitchen. It was a small, annoying task that I had been putting off for weeks. My hands were covered in dust, and I was feeling pretty frustrated with the wood that wouldn’t slide right. Then, my niece walked in, holding a drawing she had made at school. She didn’t care about the mess or my bad mood; she just leaned against my arm and waited for me to look. In that second, the frustration vanished. It is strange how quickly a person can change the weather inside a room. We spend so much of our lives bracing for impact, expecting things to be difficult, that we forget how easily we can be disarmed by a simple gesture of trust. It is a quiet kind of power, isn’t it? To be the reason someone else decides to stop worrying for a while. What is the last thing that made you feel completely safe?
Ashik Masud has captured this exact feeling of comfort in his beautiful image titled You’re my Sunshine. It reminds me so much of that morning in the kitchen, where the rest of the world just fades away. Does this portrait make you think of someone who brings that kind of light into your life?
