23 Tiny, Beautiful Moments You’ll Miss If You’re Too Busy Looking At Your Phone

1. Those rare times in adulthood when you revisit or relive a childhood memory so vividly that it feels like no time has passed. Like an old vacation home or when you’re riding in the backseat of the car and you make the raindrops on the window race each other.

2. Catching the profile of your friend’s face in the light of a streetlamp when walking around at night.

3. A genuine, contagious smile. One that you honestly cannot help but return.

4. Seeing someone you haven’t seen in a long time and feeling as though no time has passed. Time, distance, and life can affect so much that the rare unchanging purity of a genuine connection becomes that much more special.

5. The warmth that instantly fills your heart when someone pays you a unique and meaningful compliment.

6. When you thought you would never make progress and then find that you actually did in the exact moment you stopped expecting/obsessing about it.

7. The fleeting moment of satisfaction when you accomplished something you set out to do a long time ago.

8. A small recognition of knowing that you would have made your younger self so proud.

9. That phase in any relationship when you know the person/people well enough to carry a conversation, but the excitement of who they really are still lingers in the air. More specifically, the beginnings of friendships and relationships where you can tell it will stand the test of time.

10. When you hear a joke and you and your friend laugh a little, then a moment passes and you laugh even harder, then another moment passes and you find that neither of you can stop laughing.

11. Any time that you feel your inner child emerging.

12. Those underrated times of nothing. You have nothing to do, nowhere to be, and everything is just alright.

13. Seeing someone whom you used to share your pain and happiness with sharing themselves with someone else and instead of feeling expected envy, you feel happy for them. You feel that all is right with the world and how things turned out.

14. The moment when a lesson that has been spoken to you a million times over finally sinks in due to experience.

15a. When you make a far-out reference and someone actually gets it.

15b. When you can feel God in a Chili’s.

16. Those songs from your younger years that everyone knows the words to and it comes on and everyone is just singing the hell out of it together.

17. Realizing a fraction of how much your parents have actually done for you and feeling the tragically beautiful frustration of knowing only such a selfless love can exist from parent to child.

18. Long-awaited, reuniting hugs.

19. Waking up early when the day is still quiet and fresh. Like that just-got-out-of-the-shower feeling blankets your whole world.

20. Stepping in a bookstore and looking around at bound pieces of paper that represent how many wonderful people have lived, how much wisdom has been written, and how common your problems are. The vanishing of loneliness as you read something that deeply resonates with you.

21. When someone makes a joke at your expense and you sincerely find it hilarious.

22. Finding an old love or an old memory in between the lyrics of a song.

23. Truly realizing what a damn miracle and privilege it is to be a living, breathing, loving, hurting, healing, forgiving, flawed force of nature every single day.