The Weight of a Laugh

I was walking past the park this morning when I heard a sound that made me stop dead in my tracks. It was a high-pitched, messy, uncontrollable shriek of laughter coming from a toddler on a swing. It wasn’t a polite giggle; it was the kind of sound that takes over your whole body, the kind that makes your eyes water and your chest heave. I realized then that we spend so much of our adult lives trying to keep our composure. We hold our breath, we straighten our clothes, and we monitor our reactions to make sure we don’t look too foolish or too loud. But there is something sacred about losing control like that. It is a total surrender to the present moment, a way of saying that the world is big and bright and entirely overwhelming in the best possible way. When was the last time you let yourself laugh until you couldn’t breathe, without worrying about who was watching?

Kafi Rashid has captured that exact, uninhibited spirit in the image titled Happiness. It feels like a beautiful reminder to let go of our edges once in a while. Does this image bring back a specific memory of pure, unfiltered joy for you?