Smiling in the Dark

Positive philosophy for a world that goes dark

It started as a parenting tip from one of the thousands of baby blogs I browsed, searching for parenting advice in the middle of the night. "Babies can sense your emotions. Smiling while you hold them helps them feel secure. It's among the most important things you can do."

At the time I was getting maybe three hours of broken sleep a night. I was new to parenting and I would've honestly tried voodoo if someone said it helped. So I tried to smile whenever I held our newborn daughter.

I smiled night after night, walking the hall or rocking her in the darkness of her room with her little body pressed to my chest. At first it was a conscious thing. “Don’t forget to smile” quickly became “just don’t drop the one thing you can control.” But it quickly became something else. A reflex. A kind of nervous tick.

Eventually I was smiling whether she was awake in my arms or not. Whether I was awake or not. I'd catch myself in the middle of the night, in my bed, ears open, listening for a cry, but still smiling. One night I saw myself reflected in her bedroom window. What I thought was a smile, was actually me looking like a maniac. Hair wild and matted. Eyes sunken. Lips pulled into something like a grin. And I thought, if anyone saw me right now, they'd question my sanity…or call someone.

It scared me a little. But then I couldn't help but laugh at myself.

But I hadn’t lost it. That smile, tired and absurd, was focus. It was a reminder that even in the fog, I still had my footing. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d learned that kind of grit somewhere else.

I remember a time when I smiled like that in Afghanistan. It was late summer in Paktiya, and it was one of my first missions rolling with the Rakkasans (101st Airborne). They were just starting their deployment, my Civil Affairs team and I were more than halfway through ours. It wasn't too cold or too dark, but something hung in the air, maybe nerves, jitters from soldiers on their first deployment, maybe their first big mission.

After the infil, I was walking behind a line of soldiers, watching them through the monochrome green glow of my NVGs (night vision goggles). We were all single-file, walking on what felt like a tight rope, a narrow berm of dirt that separated two fields of mud on either side of us. In the mission brief, nobody had mentioned walking between fields, moving slowly, completely exposed. I knew it wasn't part of the plan.

Then I saw it, a soldier ahead disappeared, sliding fast off the berm and into the mud. The second tried to help them and went down too. Within thirty seconds, it seemed like half the patrol was flopping around, trying to free themselves from the wet mud. The radios remained silent, but I could hear all the swearing and frustration in front of me. And I smiled. Couldn't help it. It was funny, soldiers locked and loaded, in full battle rattle, getting their asses kicked by mud, in an obstacle field set up by oblivious farmers.

Photo by Aleksey Kashmar

But as I smiled, I stepped forward and went down hard. Rifle first. My mouth smashing into the buttstock. I steadied myself, spit out a mixture of mud, blood and saliva, checked my weapon, and ran my tongue over my teeth and felt something jagged. For a second I thought I'd cracked a front tooth in half. I was furious with myself and in pain. Then I thought about how funny it would be to the guys on my team. And I laughed.

We kept climbing the mountain, the temperature dropping, our packs heavier with each step. At some point I was carrying one of the only working radios. During a pause in movement, when we were all halted and on a knee, I switched my radio to the other channels and heard chatter on the fires net, coordinates being called in. I glanced at my GPS watch. We were within meters of the grid they gave. I froze. Friendly fire? Was this happening?

Then…nothing. We just stood and resumed movement. No panic. Then I heard a few pops overhead. A moment later, near-blinding brightness spilled across my NVGs. Illumination rounds. Not danger. Just someone lighting the way. I smiled again, laughing at myself for thinking my end was near, all rough-toothed and everything.

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning a kind of resilience I’d need again, years later.

The rhythm of life with young kids is different. There’s no mission objective. No after-action report. Just repetition. I’ve learned to time a milk thaw with the precision of a sniper. Learned to sterilize bottles without waking a soul. My elbows still ache, but there’s a strange satisfaction in getting it right. No medals. Just a child falling back to restful sleep, or a house that stays quiet in the dark hours of night. That’s the win.

And now, years later, holding my kids, that same self-deprecating laughter sometimes hits me again. I remember once, I was in my daughter’s room. Two thirty in the morning, holding her, her head against my chest. Her breath warm through the cotton of my shirt. My arms stung but she was asleep.

And I realized there I was, still smiling. Alone in the darkness. Still doing the thing.

I know I’m not alone. My wife fights her battles too, through long shifts, hard calls, and the invisible toll of a job where mistakes can ruin careers. Her strength hums quietly. We rarely say it, but we see it in each other. Two people sharing the weight, even when it causes shifts and changes in life.

A cold patrol in Paktiya, 2012

I used to think meaning came from tangible achievement. Leading soldiers. Performing at work. Hitting marks someone told me mattered. I was good at that. I didn't mind the pressure. It gave things weight. The pain and stress had purpose. You got medals. Promotions. People even sometimes told you you were doing a good job.

But when we had a newborn, the meaning I discovered was different. It usually had no audience, no feedback loop. The baby sleeps. The bottles get cleaned and sanitized. And the house stays quiet if I’m lucky. That's the whole thing. No awards. No promotions.

And yet, that work matters just as much, if not more, than anything I've done.

There's something about smiling when life gets brutal that feels like the most badass thing you can do. Not peace. Not joy. Just raw defiance. It's not happiness. It's a refusal to let anything take that smile from you. Most of us have heard of Sisyphus, the man condemned to push a boulder uphill forever. Camus wrote that he pictures Sisyphus happy with his fate. But I don't picture him just happy, I picture him smiling at the gods. Not begging. Not breaking. Just acknowledging the weight, then getting on with it. He doesn't need applause. He just needs the ground beneath his feet.

You can strip away someone's rank, their position, their sleep, their audience, but if they keep their smile, you haven't broken them. When I stepped away from my job, I didn’t realize how much I’d relied on being seen. On performance. On approval. But in the quiet, I started to see myself more clearly too. What mattered didn’t vanish. It just stopped needing applause.

The philosopher Epicurus said the good life isn't about chasing pleasure and recognition. It's about understanding what's essential, then needing nothing more. Most people get that wrong. They think he was talking about hiding from the world. But it's not. It's about clarity. You see what's real and drop everything else. And if you do it right, you stop begging the world to clap for you.

In this season of my life, when things are dark and nobody is looking, it feels like a kind of fading. A letting go of who I was before. There’s no scoreboard now. No audience. Just the small hours, the weight of a child, the rhythm I choose to keep, the care I choose to give. Maybe the only measure that matters is how safe my kids feel when I comfort them.

So I smile in the dark. Not because I’m winning. Not because it’s easy. But because I’m still here. I choose to be. And nothing has taken that from me.