FOUR SMALL WINS
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon when I first saw the post. I was scrolling through a quiet corner of the Internet and found it—an unassuming blog that collected stories of ordinary people who’d found a sliver of light in the cracks of their days. The headline was simple, almost shy:
Write down four small wins a day for 30 days. Document your feelings and outcome.
I read the post while the rain tapped a steady rhythm on my office window. I had been living the same loop for months: wake, workout, write, submit, scroll, sleep, repeat. The world outside seemed foreign to me, moving in a hurried blur, and inside my chest was a low-grade hum of restlessness I could not name.
I bookmarked the post, closed my laptop, and stared at the ceiling. The words lingered, a tiny mantra that felt both absurd and promising: four small wins. Four. Not a grand achievement, not a life-changing epiphany—just four moments that could be caught, held, and folded into the day like smooth stones in a pocket.
The next morning I bought a small, inexpensive journal notebook—plain, with a soft cover that smelt faintly of jasmine. I sat at my small wooden desk, the fresh notebook before me, turned to the first page and, with a hesitant smile, wrote: 1. Took a 10-minute walk in the rain enjoying the cool droplets on my skin. 2. Lit a scented candle and relaxed for three minutes. 3. Listened to my husband without planning my next story in my head. 4. Brewed tea and watched the steam rising like a small, fragrant sunrise
That night, I tucked the notebook away, feeling a strange sense of completeness—a small invisible knot morphing into a smooth bead. Thus began my quiet pilgrimage, a month-long walk through the garden of the ordinary.
The next day I ate lunch at a nearby park focusing on a pigeon strutting effortlessly across the sidewalk, its iridescent neck catching the sunlight. A jogger ran towards it, nearly tripped over it and cursed it under his breath. The pigeon, unaware, never flinched, just kept strutting gracefully down the sidewalk. I smiled thinking about the way grace moves, unconcerned with who deserves it, landing exactly where it’s needed.
By the end of the first week, the notebook’s pages were no longer pristine: Smudges from my thumb, a faint coffee ring in one corner, the crease where I’d folded it hastily into my bag. The wins were changing, too—less about tasks, more about moments. 1. Caught myself smiling at nothing. 2. Felt the sun warm my neck on the walk home. 3. Sang in the shower, the melody lingering in the air. 4. A soft swelling of heart-space. These were small, fleeting things.
In week two, I learned to look for the quiet victories that usually slipped by unnoticed. I wrote: spilling less water while washing the dishes and felt a sudden appreciation for the mundane choreography of daily chores. I also recorded: a stranger at the market held the door for me, and we exchanged a smile, a brief connection. The smile lingered and later caught myself smiling at a co-worker’s joke, something I would have otherwise dismissed.
One evening as I was closing the notebook, a voice (soft, almost inaudible) seemed to rise from the margins of the page. What you call small, I call sacred.
I laughed, half startled, half delighted, “You’re right,” I whispered. “I’ve been counting blessings, not just wins.”
During week three I prepared a simple soup, letting the vegetables simmer and mingle noting: The soup tasted of earth and patience. At midnight I ventured outside, sitting on the back porch watching the night sky. I scribbled: My awareness of God has stretched beyond my own backyard. Thank you, God, for the small wins, for the tiny miracles that stitch my days together. I see that each win is a thread, and together they weave a beautiful tapestry.
As the days slipped by, I noticed a transformation that went beyond the pages. The small wins stopped feeling like tasks to be checked off; they became practices of presence. I greeted the morning with a soft inhale, counting my breaths as if they were tiny victories. When a long line at the pharmacy stretched the wait time, I counted it as a chance to feel gratitude for the unexpected pause.
A real surprise came at the end of week three. I found myself kneeling inside the church. I was walking through my neighborhood; I hadn’t planned to stop—hadn’t set foot in a pew since Mother’s funeral. But the way the late afternoon light hit the stained glass stopped me mid-step. Inside, the air smelt of wax and mildew and something faintly sweet, like forgotten Easter candy. I didn’t pray; I just sat there, my notebook open on my knees adding: Dust motes dancing in the red-blue light from mosaic of Jonah and the Whale. God’s glitter. Outside a car backfired as loud as a gunshot, and I jumped then laughed writing: Holiness sandwiched between the mundane.
By week four, the world became a series of small, electrifying collisions: the way the store clerk’s tattoo peeked out from her sleeve: Looks like Hebrew script on her wrist, maybe a psalm, maybe an ex’s name. Either way, it’s a prayer. Even my own reflection surprised me one morning: Crow’s feet when I smile now. Not cracks just small fissures where God’s light gets in.
On day 26, I stood in the produce aisle, transfixed by a display of pomegranates. Their skins were split in places, revealing clusters of rubies beneath. A woman beside me clicked her tongue. “Overripe!” she muttered, selecting an unblemished apple instead. I bought the damaged pomegranate, took it home and cracked it open at the kitchen sink, the red juice running down my wrists. Seeds like raw gems. The broken ones taste sweeter. I smiled realizing that we humans are also broken, but God sees the raw gems we are.
By the end of the final week, the notebook’s spine was cracked, its pages fat with pressed flowers and grocery lists turned to prayer. I stopped numbering the entries, for there was no containing them now. They spilled into my dreams, into my writing, into the way I held doors open for strangers. They spilled into the silence connecting me with God. On the last day of the month, I sat on my porch steps watching the sky shift from indigo to peach. The notebook lay open on my lap, empty. For the first time, I hesitated then I wrote, not with ink but with my fingernail pressed gently into the paper: The miracle isn’t that I noticed. It’s that it was all here, waiting to be seen.
I kept the notebook for a while longer, returning to its pages in the evenings when the world seemed too loud, too evil. I realized that the practice had done more than catalog moments; it had taught me spiritual discipline: the art of turning attention toward God, the divine that dwells in the ordinary and mundane.
The blog post had been a single seed, whispered like a soft prayer. Each small win was a seed; together they blossomed into a garden of gratitude and quiet joy. The world feels larger, yet more intimate, as if the veil has thinned, and I can see the subtle threads that bind all things together. The deeper spiritual lesson was simple yet profound: When you honor the tiny wins, you honor God and the very breath of life itself.
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