Today, I met someone new, and the first thing they said to me was, “I love you.” Caught off guard, I panicked and blurted out, “Nice to meet you!”
Luckily, they didn’t seem to mind my awkward response. Even though I hadn’t matched their enthusiasm, they happily accepted my greeting. I worried that I had made a bad first impression, but to my relief, it didn’t seem to matter.
Charlie, as it turns out, was completely unfazed. Instead, he handed me a slice of angel cake he had just bought from the shop. I accepted, and from that moment, I could tell he respected my appreciation for cake. I had passed the test—we were officially friends.
Charlie is six years old. My sister, who works as a childminder, had told me a lot about him, and today, I finally got to meet him. He lived up to everything she had said.
He’s like a little whirlwind, bouncing between eating ham sandwiches, offering cake, chatting about random things, and sprinting around. His world is all about the present—whatever is right in front of him is the most important thing.
Spending just half an hour with Charlie makes you realize that your problems aren’t as bad as you thought. A six-year-old is impressed by how high you can jump, and somehow, that makes you smile.
There’s a quote by Omar Khayyam: “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” Life is really just a series of “this moments.” Even in bad times, there’s usually something to appreciate—a lesson to learn, an ending in sight, or even just the challenge itself.
The philosopher Seneca also warned against losing the present by always thinking ahead:
Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.
On the Shortness of Life IX
Don’t lose today—experience it. Appreciate things as if they were placed in front of you just for you, as if you were seeing them for the first time. I’m not saying you have to run into a field every morning, stare at a daisy with wide-eyed wonder, and praise the sun for photosynthesis. Luckily, it takes less effort than that.
It’s not about seeing the glass as half full—it’s about appreciating the fact that you have a glass at all. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine explains that someone who hasn’t lost their sense of joy finds the world amazing, while everyone else just sees an ordinary glass, half-empty.
Charlie loves ham sandwiches. Just a slice of processed ham between two pieces of bread. Given the choice between that and any other meal, he’d choose the sandwich every time. To most people, ham sandwiches are boring. To Charlie, they’re “looovely.” Watching him eat one, every bite seems just as exciting as the first. How can I ever complain about a meal knowing how happy a six-year-old is with something so simple?
After his sandwich, Charlie wanted to go outside and play. He invited me along, and I felt that warm sense of acceptance again. Soon, we were racing around the garden, jumping on and off steps, running with no real direction but laughing the whole time.
For ten or fifteen minutes, nothing else mattered except where to run next. Pure happiness in the moment.
We can’t chase happiness by running around aimlessly all day, but we can adopt that mindset more often. We can pause and ask ourselves—am I happy in this moment? What small thing can I appreciate right now?
Eventually, it was time for Charlie to go home. No drawn-out goodbyes—just a quick farewell, and he was off to the next adventure. His attitude seemed to be: Well, I knew this couldn’t last forever. What’s next? He moves from one moment to the next without clinging to the past.
In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine explains how the Stoics believed in letting go of the past. Marcus Aurelius saw the present moment as all we truly own, urging people to live fully in “this fleeting instant.”
It’s not easy to let go of the past, to let regrets drift away like dandelion seeds. But things like meditation and journaling can help us stay grounded. Otherwise, we risk getting stuck, replaying old mistakes instead of moving forward.
Of course, we won’t always see the world through Charlie’s eyes, but as Seneca once said, we should hold on to the enthusiasm of youth—it becomes even more valuable as we get older.
One last thing about Charlie—he has Down’s syndrome. It’s a condition associated with learning disabilities and characteristic facial features. Maybe life will get harder for him as he grows up and realizes he’s different to most other people, or maybe he’ll hold on to his pure way of seeing the world. I don’t know.
What I do know is that right now, he’s fully in the moment. And I wish I could be more like that.
