I was flying home to the Yukon on an Air North flight from Ottawa to Whitehorse, somewhere above the vast and beautiful Canadian wilderness, when I received one of the most profound lessons of my life. The teacher was perhaps six months old. He did not know he was teaching. That is what made it so pure.
A young mother was walking the aisle, carrying her baby boy. The passengers around me, tired travellers, people lost in their own thoughts, began to soften. You could see it happen, one face at a time. A smile here. A gentle look there. The baby was doing what babies do: he was being completely, honestly alive.
He smiled. Then he cried. Then he smiled again. Back and forth, switching in an instant, without shame, without apology, without any effort to hide what he was feeling. His face was like a clear northern sky, every cloud visible, every ray of sun unfiltered.
I watched him and I thought about dance. When I dance Bhangra on a frozen Yukon lake at minus forty-five degrees, people sometimes ask me: how can you feel joy in that cold? But I have learned that joy is not the absence of difficulty. Joy lives alongside everything else — the cold, the loneliness, the grief, the uncertainty. In Punjab, where I was raised, Bhangra was born in the fields during harvest. It was the dance of people who knew hard work and hard seasons. They did not dance because life was easy. They danced because they were fully alive.
That baby on the plane understood this completely.
As we grow older, we are taught to perform composure. We learn to keep our sadness tucked away, out of sight, like something embarrassing. We smile when we do not feel like smiling. We say “I am fine” when we are not fine at all. Society rewards this. We become very skilled at it. But somewhere in the mastering of that performance, we lose touch with our own interior weather. We forget what we actually feel, because we have spent so many years hiding it.
The Yukon has taught me something different. When I step outside my cabin into the wilderness, nature does not pretend. The river does not hide its current. The northern lights do not apologize for their brightness. The darkness of winter does not make excuses. Everything simply is what it is. That honesty is part of why I feel so healed by this land. It gives me permission to be real.
The baby on that flight was offering all of us that same permission.
I believe that when we suppress one emotion, we dull them all. We cannot selectively mute sadness and keep joy at full volume. The heart does not work that way. The baby’s laughter was so luminous precisely because his tears were so genuine. They were part of the same wholeness.
If we want to build lives of true and lasting joy, not the performance of joy, but the real thing, we must first make room for the full range of what it means to be human. We must honour the sadness. We must give it space and time, without rushing to fix it or hide it. We must let it move through us the way weather moves across the Yukon sky — acknowledged, respected, and eventually passing.
We carry our emotions from the very first days of our lives. Long before we have words for them. Long before the world tells us which ones are acceptable. Let us return to that original honesty. Let us be a little more like that beautiful baby on the Air North flight from Ottawa to Whitehorse, willing to feel everything, hide nothing, and trust that the smile will come again.
Spread joy. Honour all of it. That is the path home.
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