The Weight of a Smile

I was walking home through the park this morning when I saw a toddler drop his ice cream cone. I braced myself for the inevitable wail, the sudden collapse of a small world. But he didn’t cry. He just looked at the mess on the pavement, then looked up at his mother, and started to laugh. It was a bright, messy, completely unbothered sound. It made me realize how much of my own day is spent guarding against disappointment, trying to keep everything neat and predictable. We grow up and we lose that ability to find the humor in a ruined plan. We treat happiness like a fragile thing that needs to be protected, rather than something that can be found in the middle of a mistake or a muddy patch of ground. When did we decide that joy had to be earned, or that it had to look a certain way to be real? Sometimes, it is just there, waiting for us to stop being so serious.

This feeling of unscripted happiness is exactly what Jabbar Jamil captured in his image titled Oh Joy. It is a beautiful reminder of how simple things can be when we let them. Does this image bring back a specific memory of your own childhood?