The Year I Said Yes to Everything Small
Not skydiving: just tea invitations, short walks, and open windows.
My downstairs neighbor asked me to tea eleven times before I said yes, and I only said yes the eleventh time because I had made a rule that morning and was too proud to break it on day one.
The rule was this: for one year, I would say yes to everything small. Not the big stuff. I had read those articles about people who say yes to everything and end up skydiving in Interlaken with strangers named Klaus, and I knew myself well enough to know I did not have a Klaus year in me.
I had barely had a getting-dressed year in me.
The previous winter had flattened me in the quiet, undiagnosable way winters sometimes do: a breakup that was technically mutual, a job that had turned into a screen I apologized to, and a talent I had developed for declining things so smoothly that people eventually, politely, stopped asking.
That is the part nobody warns you about.
Isolation is not a door slamming.
It is a hundred invitations answered with "maybe next time"... until the invitations, reasonably, go elsewhere. By February I could go a full weekend speaking only to a food delivery app.
So: small yeses only. Anything under an hour, anything free or nearly free, anything within walking distance. Tea counted. A walk counted. Opening the window counted, which sounds pathetic until you have spent a season not doing it.
Mrs. Almeida, the neighbor, opened her door before I finished knocking, as if she had been standing behind it since invitation number one.
The ledger
I kept a list that year, in a notebook with a cracked spine, and I am looking at it as I write this. It reads like the world's least ambitious bucket list.
Tea with Mrs. A. Walked to the far chai stall instead of the near one. Said yes when Prakash from accounts asked if anyone wanted to see the office roof, and stood on the office roof at dusk with three coworkers I had worked beside for two years and never once spoken to about anything but invoices, watching the city lights come on in their unorganized thousands, and one of them, Meera, said, "I come up here when I want to remember the spreadsheet isn't real," and we all laughed the specific laugh of people realizing they might become friends.
Yes to the library card. Yes to the free Sunday concert in the park, where the tabla player was twelve years old and merciless. Yes to holding a stranger's dog outside a pharmacy... ninety seconds that I thought about for a week. Yes to my cousin's daughter's school play, in which she portrayed, and I quote the program, Vegetable Number Two.
None of it was impressive.
That was the discovery. It did not need to be.
Big yeses change your plans. Small yeses change your days, and your days, it turns out, are your life.
Somewhere around month four, the yeses started compounding, the way money is supposed to and never does. Tea with Mrs. Almeida became Tuesdays. Tuesdays became her teaching me her mother's ginger chai, which involves an amount of ginger I would describe as legally actionable.
The office roof became a standing thing, four of us and a biscuit tin. The library card became a poetry shelf I had no business standing in front of, which became me copying out a poem about loneliness by hand because it described my February better than I had ever dared to, which became me writing my own, terrible at first... then less terrible.
In autumn I did something that was, by the rule's standards, enormous: I posted one of those poems on a community wall for poets, where actual strangers could see it. My finger hovered for a long time...
A stranger named Sana left four words on it, "this was my winter," and I sat with my phone against my chest like a hot water bottle. Later, when I ran dry, I raided a page of prompts the way I used to raid the fridge at midnight, and one prompt about open windows turned into the poem I am still proudest of.
The eleventh cup
Here is the turn I did not see coming, and I want to put it plainly because it rearranged me.
In November, over the forty-something-th cup of ginger chai, Mrs. Almeida mentioned, in the offhand way people mention their largest things, that she had asked me to tea eleven times... because her doctor had told her to. After her husband died she had stopped asking anyone for anything, and the doctor, apparently a wise one, had prescribed her one invitation a week, extended to anybody, accepted or not. "You were my homework," she said, refilling my cup, delighted with herself.
All those months I had thought I was the drowning one and she was the shore.
We were two people doing the same homework from opposite sides of a ceiling. Her ten unanswered invitations had cost her something every single time, and she had paid it, ten times, for a stranger upstairs who kept saying maybe next time. I think about that whenever I am deciding whether asking twice is too much.
Ask eleven times.
Somewhere above or below you, someone has a rule they are too proud to break.
I wish I could tell you the year ended with fireworks. It ended smaller, which is fitting. On the last evening of December I took the biscuit tin up to the office roof alone, because the others had families and I had said yes to covering the late shift. The city was doing its dusk thing, going from grey to gold to that deep blue that makes every lit window look like a secret being told. I sat on the concrete with my back against the water tank, still in my work clothes, and ate the last biscuit, and did the arithmetic of my ledger: one hundred and ninety-one small yeses.
No skydiving. No Klaus. Nothing that would survive a dinner party anecdote.
Just this: a person on a rooftop who knew, for certain, that there were four people in the building behind her and one woman two streets over who would notice if she vanished. A person with ginger chai in her method and a poem on a wall with four words under it. A person who had, without noticing the exact moment, stopped surviving her days and started attending them. If that is not hope, it is at least hope's opening act, and I have learned to say yes to opening acts.
The rule expired at midnight. I have not needed it since, the way you do not need the training wheels once your body has learned the lean. But I still open the window first thing every morning, before tea, before the phone, before I am ready.
Some yeses you say once. The good ones you say daily, quietly, for the rest of your life.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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