It’s Friday nearly 6pm.  60% to 70% of the folks already left work to enjoy early start of the weekend. I am still in office, battling with tool limitations and various manual steps of compiling/deploying/testing.  It’s a life of a developer who’s starting to get behind schedule.  Yup.  That’s me.

I was washing cups in the break room when a family of 3 walked in.  A dad, mom, and a little boy who’s probably 3 or 4 years old.  Dad said, “Wait, I am getting a water bottle”.  Mom repeated, “Daddy is getting you a water bottle.”

We have the vending machine type of soda dispenser, with brightly lit and larger than palm size buttons to push for selection.  People use it daily, pushing with their palms, a couple fingers, elbows, robotic like.  When the water bottle drops down, it makes a bit of rumbling noise, like a drunk person walking down the stairs I imagined, then the bottle gets to the bottom opening.

Suddenly I heard this chuckle turning to laughter.   The boy probably thought it was a magic, or a big toy.  It was loud and clear and heart-felt.   The mom looked at me with a smile, a little embarrassed I assumed.  While they were walking out, I thought of how happy that boy was, with the magic of the big vending machine 10 times of his size.

His happiness is so simple, laughter so true.  Oh, how I envy him.

That’s the part I don’t get growing older, why we just lose it.   It becomes inappropriate to be simply happy of little things around us.  When we say we are happy about something, it usually is something big, like getting married, buying a new car, new job, promotion, vacation, etc.  Why can’t we just say just because the flower bloomed, the sky is beautiful today, the trees putting on new colors, the peacefulness of a night?  Nobody talks about those any more.  And fewer and fewer people are noticing them.

To me, everyday, surrounded by people demanding and disagreeing, machines fighting against, stress from deadlines, tired.  But when I share food and goodies with friends, I sometimes find a little simple happiness in me.  Smoothness and richness of the dark chocolate, the smell of expresso, the after taste of green tea, the wonderful texture of mochi.  Oh, they are enough to make me smile for a while, until I am surrounded again by the busy schedule, broken AC, strange errors…