Alright, so this whole “kawhi smile” thing. It wasn’t like I set out to become a basketball player or analyze game footage frame by frame. Nah, it was more of a personal, kinda weird experiment I ran on myself a while back. You know how sometimes you just latch onto an idea? This was one of those.
It all kicked off when I was drowning in what felt like endless, soul-crushing admin. We’ve all been there, right? Forms, emails that needed replies yesterday, troubleshooting things that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I was getting seriously wound up. And then I saw some clip of Kawhi Leonard, this dude famous for being emotionless, and he just cracks this tiny, almost invisible smirk after sinking a game-winner. And I thought, “Huh. There’s something to that.” Not the winning, necessarily, but that little moment of… something. A glitch in the matrix of stoicism.
So, I Tried to Bottle That Vibe
My “practice,” if you can call it that, was pretty straightforward, at least on paper. I decided I was going to actively look for my own “kawhi smile” moments. Not to force a smile, because that’s just creepy, but to notice those tiny, fleeting instances of absurd humor, or quiet satisfaction, or just plain weirdness in the middle of the daily grind. Especially when things were annoying.
So, what did I actually do?
- When I was on hold for ages with some company, instead of fuming, I’d try to listen to the terrible hold music as if it were an avant-garde art piece. Sometimes it was so bad, it was genuinely funny.
- Tackling a hideous spreadsheet? I’d look for a typo so ridiculous it made me chuckle, or a number that seemed comically out of place.
- Dealing with a particularly dense email chain? I’d imagine the whole thing as a badly written sitcom script.
It was about shifting perspective, just a tiny bit. Trying to find the crack where the light gets in, or at least where the absurdity makes you snort.
Now, did it turn me into some zen master? Absolutely not. There were days I completely forgot. Days I was just plain grumpy. I remember one specific week, I was trying to assemble this flat-pack furniture. The instructions looked like they were drawn by a toddler who’d had too much sugar. Every screw, every dowel felt like a personal insult. My “kawhi smile” practice went right out the window. I was more like a “kawhi yelling into a pillow,” if that’s a thing. It was a disaster. I think I invented some new curse words that week. My neighbor probably thought I was wrestling a bear.
The funny thing is, after the rage subsided, and I was staring at this wobbly bookshelf that looked like it had seen better days even though it was brand new, I found a spare cam lock just sitting there. An extra one. After all that drama. And I just… laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh. More of a tired, defeated smirk. Maybe that was my “kawhi smile” for the week. A very, very subtle one.
So, what’s the takeaway? I don’t have a grand conclusion. It’s not like I unlocked some secret to eternal happiness. But, you know, sometimes, just sometimes, consciously looking for those tiny, almost-missed moments did make the annoying stuff a little less… all-consuming. It didn’t fix the problems, but it occasionally put a little buffer between me and the frustration. And I guess, sometimes, that’s enough. It’s still a work in progress, this whole thing. Just like that wobbly bookshelf, probably.
