What if the secret to staying light hearted is not about avoiding pain but about learning to sit with it on a cold evening, under a yellow lantern, and still taste the sweetness of ice cream with sprinkles? That question has followed me for years, quietly shaping the way I understand joy, loss, and the everyday effort it takes to remain soft in a world that often demands hardness.
When I was a child, there was a particular moment each evening that unsettled me. The old sodium lanterns in our street would flicker on at dusk, and suddenly the whole world turned yellow. Not a warm, golden yellow — a flat, monochrome wash that drained everything of its earlier life. As a boy, I could not explain why it made me sad. It just did. The ditches outside were freezing, people’s breath hung in clouds, and I sat at the window watching colour seep out of the day. My father noticed. He asked me why I had gone quiet. I did not know how to answer. How could he not feel the same weight?
He did something simple in response. He said, “Let’s get an ice cream in the village.” I climbed onto the back of his bicycle, and we rode through that yellow world together. The shop was closing, but we arrived just in time. We stood outside under one of those lanterns, eating ice cream, snow crunching under his boots. He held his bike in one hand and his cone in the other. “Lekker, he?” he said — delicious, right? I have never been sure, but it felt as if in that moment he meant to say, “We are both feeling this together, are we not?” That moment, small as it was, planted something in me. It suggested that staying light hearted did not mean pretending the sadness was not there. It meant letting the sadness sit beside a shared sweetness and continuing anyway.
Why Did the Sodium Lanterns Make the Author Sad?
The lanterns marked a loss of colour. As a child, I did not have the words for grief or nostalgia. I only knew that when the streetlights came on, something vivid disappeared. The world outside my window went from green, red, and blue to a single shade of amber. That feeling of diminishment — of vibrancy draining away — became my earliest encounter with the idea that time strips colour from things. The lanterns became a symbol, long before I understood what they symbolised.
In hindsight, that childhood sadness was a premonition. It was the first taste of a truth that would later sit at the centre of my life: that the world inevitably loses some of its saturation as you grow older. Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never materialise, words left unspoken until it is too late — all of these things accumulate. They stack up like frozen leaves in a ditch. And the question that haunted me then, and has haunted me since, is whether anyone can genuinely resist that drift. Can you hold onto colour? Can you stay light hearted when every year adds another layer of weight?
I am thirty now, and it has been ten years since my father died of cancer. That yellow-lantern feeling no longer arrives only at dusk. Some days it is there when I wake. The colours do not always return in the mornings the way they used to. And yet I still believe the question is worth exploring.
How Did the Author Cope With the Loss of His Father?
Growing up, I watched people around me carry life’s weight in different ways. Some clung fiercely to their careers, as if professional success could insulate them from pain. Others projected their hope onto partners, expecting one person to make the world bright again. A few turned to gurus or spiritual shortcuts, searching for a ready-made answer that might dissolve the ache. And many simply turned grey themselves — they stopped fighting, stopped hoping, stopped noticing the absence of colour. I saw that path and feared it more than any other.
I subscribed to a different approach. I pledged myself to the idea that with enough effort, I could make a change in this world, and that change would keep me light. I called it a quest. Throughout my twenties, I threw myself into everything that seemed meaningful: philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, writing. I loved being busy. I loved chasing new perspectives, new skills, new frameworks. I believed that staying light hearted was a matter of accumulation — if I gathered enough meaning, the weight of suffering would simply be outweighed.
On the surface, things went well. From the outside, I looked like someone who had found his stride. But there was a problem. The more answers I collected, the bleaker the world appeared. Each philosophy I studied revealed a new layer of contradiction. Each new pursuit eventually hit its ceiling. The quest itself started to feel like a losing battle — a race I could not win because the finish line kept moving. The sodium-lamp feeling stopped being an evening event. It became a constant.
I realised then that staying light hearted could not be achieved through brute-force optimism or by piling achievements on top of grief. Fighting embitterment with activity alone is like trying to outrun your own shadow. The shadow does not tire.
What Did the Author’s Mentor Mean by Being a Romantic?
One of my earlier mentors in art school once said something I did not fully understand at the time. She said, “Sam, being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” Years later, those words still return to me. A romantic, in her sense, is not someone who sees the world through rose-coloured lenses. A romantic is someone who tries to maintain hope and lightness in a world that constantly wears you down. A romantic holds space for beauty even when the evidence for it is thin.
That definition reframed everything for me. Staying light hearted was not about naivety or denial. It was not about pretending that loss does not hurt. It was about cultivating a stubborn tenderness — a decision to remain soft when hardening would be easier. My mentor understood that the romantic impulse is fragile. It takes work. You protect it not by avoiding the hard parts of life, but by choosing, again and again, to see value in the soft parts.
That romantic quality is what I had glimpsed in my father under the sodium lamp. He did not try to fix my sadness. He did not explain it away. He simply stood with me in the cold, eating ice cream, acknowledging that we were both feeling the weight of the evening. And then he stayed. That was his romantic act.
What Was the Turning Point for the Author?
There came a period in my late twenties when I had exhausted my known world. Not because I had tried everything, but because I had tried enough to see a pattern: every answer I found produced a bleaker world than the one before it. Philosophy revealed the limits of reason. Art revealed the limits of expression. Success revealed the limits of satisfaction. I had followed every thread, and each one led to a room with no windows.
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It was during that stretch that a thought kept returning. Not as a plan, exactly, but as a kind of assurance. It whispered that the door was there if I wanted it. That I could step out. That I could simply stop carrying the weight. The abyss I had been afraid of suddenly felt less like a threat and more like a strange kind of freedom. When you have nothing left to lose, the unknown stops being frightening and starts feeling alive again.
That was the turning point. Not a triumphant breakthrough. Not a sudden discovery of the secret to staying light hearted. Just a quiet surrender to the fact that I did not have to have everything figured out. The yellow world could stay. I did not need to force the colour back. I could sit in the monochrome and still choose to move forward.
What Did the Woman With the Tea Box Teach Him?
During that time, I spoke to a woman who seemed to glow from the inside. She was light, full of laughter, and always appeared to be smiling at some private joke the world was telling her. She had a tea box on her shelf, but it did not contain the usual red bush or mint or Earl Grey. Instead, she had teas with names like Namastea, empatea, and tearapy. I asked her about them, and she laughed — actually, she could not even remember the real flavours. We laughed and laughed, and the silliness of it made the moment feel weightless.
We talked about the heaviness I had been carrying. I told her about my father, about the lanterns, about the years of chasing answers. She listened without trying to fix anything. Then she said something that has stayed with me: “You are simply a man who comes and goes, exploring as genuinely as he can. If so, why not continue exploring?”
Her words were not a prescription. They were an invitation. She showed me that staying light hearted is not about arriving at a final destination where everything makes sense. It is about refusing to stop exploring. It is about approaching your own life with the same curiosity you would bring to a foreign city — accepting that you will get lost, that you will not see everything, and that the point is the walking itself. She made me see that exploration, when done genuinely, does not require convenience. It does not require comfort. It only requires a willingness to stay open.
That conversation shifted something in me. The quest for a permanent answer had been exhausting me. But the invitation to simply keep exploring — that felt light. That felt possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can someone practice staying light hearted during difficult life transitions?
Start by lowering the stakes. Staying light hearted does not mean forcing happiness when you are hurting. It means allowing yourself small, genuine moments of curiosity or connection — a shared laugh, a walk without a destination, a tea with a silly name. These tiny acts of exploration keep the door open to lightness without demanding that you fix everything at once.
Is staying light hearted the same as avoiding serious emotions or being in denial?
No, it is the opposite. Staying light hearted means acknowledging the weight and choosing not to let it define your entire existence. Denial pushes feelings away. Lightness, in the way described here, involves sitting with sadness while also holding space for sweetness — like eating ice cream in the cold. Both things can be true at once.
What is the most practical first step for someone who feels stuck in heaviness?
Adopt the mindset of a curious explorer rather than a problem-solver. Instead of asking, “How do I fix this?” ask, “What can I notice about this moment?” That shift alone can loosen the grip of heaviness. Follow a small thread of interest — a conversation, a walk, a silly tea name — without needing it to lead anywhere meaningful. The meaning comes from the movement itself.
Years after that evening under the sodium lamp, I still feel the sadness of the yellow world. It returns on quiet evenings and in unexpected memories. But I also remember the taste of ice cream with sprinkles, and the sound of my father’s boots in the snow, and the laughter of a woman who forgot the names of her own teas. Those pockets of lightness are not escapes from the weight. They are the weight’s companions. Staying light hearted, I have learned, is not about chasing permanent brightness. It is about letting the colour return, moment by moment, even when the lanterns are still on.
