Giggling

Eyes shine, lips ripple

Contagion spreads, heart-to-heart

Breathlessly happy

I’ve been reflecting on giggling as a brief suspension of gravity, a moment when seriousness loosens its grip and the world tilts toward delight.

Giggling is rarely about the joke itself. It is about permission. Someone breaks first, and suddenly, restraint feels unnecessary. The sound escapes before it can be judged, carrying with it a kind of shared relief: we are safe enough here to be uncomposed.

~

Unlike laughter, which can be assertive or performative, giggling is vulnerable. It interrupts order. It exposes joy before it has been justified. That is why it spreads so quickly. It moves not through reason, but through recognition, passing from body to body faster than explanation.

In tense rooms, a single giggle can redraw the emotional map. Not by solving anything, but by reminding everyone that connection precedes argument, that feeling arrives before sense-making.

~

Giggling does not last. It cannot be summoned or sustained without collapsing into something else. But its value lies precisely in its brevity. It marks a moment of unguarded togetherness, a shared breath where happiness needs no defence.

In that instant, the heart remembers what it feels like to be light, and the body carries that memory forward, quietly, into more serious things.