INTERSECTIONALITY

A Lesson From The Streets

Life is really what we make of it

Author’s image.

On a normal day in Beirut, I was stuck in traffic.

Not the calm kind of traffic. The real Beirut kind.

Cars squeezing into impossible spaces. People honking like the horn might magically dissolve the cars in front of them. Motorcycles appearing out of nowhere. The kind of traffic that slowly pushes you into that familiar mood: irritated, tired, questioning your life choices.

I was sitting in the car thinking, What am I even doing with my life?

Then I did what most of us do when we’re trapped in traffic with nothing to do. I grabbed my phone.

Scrolling. Scrolling. Scrolling.

Just trying to escape reality for a few minutes, burning time until the cars moved again. And then, as I took my eyes off the phone and looked outside for a few seconds, I saw him.

A Man in the Middle of Chaos

On the side of the road, a man was working, collecting garbage from the street. Plastic bags, paper, dust…. things people had thrown without thinking twice.

Not exactly the kind of job most people would describe as joyful.

But this man had earphones in. And he was dancing. Not a little head movement. Not just tapping his foot.

He was fully dancing while picking up trash. Singing along to a song only he could hear. Spinning slightly as he moved the broom.

Smiling like he was somewhere completely different.

For a moment, the chaos of the street disappeared. Here was a man doing one of the shittiest jobs imaginable. And he was having so much fun doing it.

I stopped scrolling. I stopped thinking about the traffic. I just watched him. And suddenly a thought hit me.

Maybe happiness isn’t about what we do

We spend so much of our lives believing happiness will come later.

When we get the right job. When we earn more money. When life becomes easier. When things finally go our way.

We think happiness lives somewhere in the future.

But that man on the street didn’t look like he was waiting for a better moment. He looked like he had already decided to enjoy this one.

Life is how we take it

That moment stayed with me, because it made something very simple, but very powerful, click in my mind:

No matter what you are doing in life, whether it’s exciting, boring, messy, or exhausting, it’s how you deal with it that changes everything.

You can carry your day like a heavy weight.

Or you can dance through parts of it.

A Small Moment, A Big Reminder

I was just someone stuck in traffic. He was just someone cleaning the street.

But in that tiny moment, in the middle of chaos, he reminded me of something I think we often forget: life is not only what happens to us.

Life is how we look at it.

How we deal with it.

How we decide to live through it.

And sometimes, the deepest lessons about life don’t come from books or podcasts or big life events.

Sometimes they come from a man dancing while cleaning the streets of Beirut.

Dance Anyway

Life will always hand us trash, literal or metaphorical.

But how we sweep it, how we dance through it, how we choose to live with it…. that is where the beauty lives.

Happiness isn’t waiting for the perfect moment.

It’s making this moment matter, even when the world around you is messy, loud, and impossible.

So maybe the real lesson is this:

Dance anyway. Smile anyway. Live anyway.

And let the world see that joy is a choice, not a condition.

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