E Ellis Allen (girlonstilts.com)

Back in the day, I loved looking at slides—those tiny squares with white paper edges that held the negative of a photograph that you then loaded into a carousel, and a projector magically threw the true image onto a movie screen, white sheet, or blank wall. But before then, while looking at those slides, each image was a warped representation of the world I knew, and I loved it.

In a negative, my brown hair was white, the same with my eyes. In negatives, a snowy landscape with a trail cut between snow-laced trees morphed into blackened volcanic ground, trails turned into scars, and tar-covered ashy trees. What can I say? I was a weird little kid.

I didn’t prefer the negative over the positive–both the positive and the negative offer their own kind of magic. It was that I enjoyed a different perspective. Suddenly, I had a new way of looking at the same old.

As someone with Depression and Anxiety, I’ve spent a lifetime learning and understanding triggers— lack of physical exercise, too many days without sunlight, or one whiff of mothballs in an antique shop and click!—depression raises its ugly head. Likewise, too many people crammed into one place or too much place without any people, and Bam! Adrenaline kicks up my anxiety. See? Triggers–those sudden situations that blindside you and revert you into feeling the worst experiences of your life. For me, it’s too much or too little of anything, and I get all triggered up.

The word, trigger, is appropriate. Like the sound of a gun, locked and loaded, the intensity of certain stimuli can also result in a sudden charge—a compulsion to run for your life or else a bare-knuckle brawl that you are both never prepared for and always unprepared for, leaving dread in its wake.

Triggers are part of my story, a snapshot of my experience and the negative of my life’s complete picture. I thought this was the true and only aspect, a pattern I would have to watch out for in the name of self-preservation. I was dead wrong.

Recently, I learned of another batch of stimuli opposite to triggers called glimmers. Immediately, the word creates an image of a dense dark wood with tiny lightning bugs zipping through the void.

Most people are familiar with the term, a glimmer of hope. In a moment surrounded by despair, a thin beam of light can penetrate a storm and guide us back to safety. These are glimmers.

Unlike triggers, glimmers are things that conjure happy times. Instead of instantaneous adrenaline spikes to get us to safety or save our knuckles from getting bloody, glimmers are things that calm us down, help us take a moment to breathe, make us smile, and reset our nervous system.

Usually, glimmers are associated with summertime (for some reason) and presented to people like, “What’s your favorite part about summer?” The regular glimmer response seems to be “the smell of newly cut grass” (which is super glimmery for me). 

However, in trying to understand my own glimmers, I had to take the concept out to the street (well, really, a couple of different text chains) and gather data. The text chain that got me started on this track was “Name three of your Glimmers.” What followed was a list of nothing but hopeful and beautiful images.

“Hot coffee in the morning,” “Nighttime baths,” “Sitting outside at night watching the sunset,” “My hands in dirt,” “Lying on the sofa with (pet).”

Some of mine included the pop of a fire, bare feet in the grass, and rediscovering a forgotten song.

However, I was almost undone when someone wrote, “Coming home, after a really long day to the smell of dinner thoughtfully ready, looking down on the lights from the top of a peak that took hours to get there, and the poke your baby gives from inside the womb.”

These are glimmers. These are what make life bearable and sweet. These are the other side to the snapshots of our lives.

I love the idea of searching for patterns of glimmers. But I don’t like the actual word for them. Glimmer sounds like a glimpse, as in a tiny sliver of sunlight that darkness will soon swallow up. Glimmer is not apt enough, but it’s a start.

My whole lifetime is a carousel of snapshot moments that, when inspected and understood, are sometimes horrific but often very good (yes, I know, rhyme intended).

Perhaps that is what we all need to do—instead of reacting to negative stimuli and waiting to get beyond them, we need to specifically search for ways to trigger happiness–become a brand of glimmerati and spread a bit of shine to others. We need to glimmer!

What are some of your glimmer moments? Care to share?