I was on a Sunday morning stroll in Vlore, a city along Albania’s southern coast. Old men in their coats huddled over board games in the parks. The cafes were brimming with people too. Albanians love their conversations as much as their coffee. But it wasn’t coffee I was after, I was looking for a haircut.Since I don’t have the time to indulge in immersive travel fantasies any more, I make sure to carve time for mundane rituals whenever I travel. Shopping at the local grocer or chatting with a local host over dinner can tell you as much about a place as a museum can. My friend went a step ahead and got a haircut when in Spain. After he vouched for the experience, I had to try it out.My earliest memory of a haircut is Appa instructing the barber to spray enough water on our heads afterwards.“Extra phuss, phuss this time,” was his specific instruction to the barber.The cold jet on scalded skin felt heaven-sent, but it was the noise it made as it was pumped out that had us excited.My instructions to barbers codified over time — “Short on the sides, slope on the rear, combing crop in the front.” Being from a respectable household meant we always asked for medium-short and never full-short. Fads like Army cut and wedge cut too were deemed out of bounds.The routine changed when I moved to the Netherlands. My attempts to speak Dutch often resulted in spitting out words from the tongues I had forsaken over the years. Besides, I never found the Dutch equivalent of medium-short. Specifying the trimmer size was a workaround — but it never hit the spot like a medium-short did.Male haircuts across the world seem to have converged to just a few variants. The winner is the footballer cut: sides and back shaved bald, with a healthy tuft at the top. I have long aspired to this version of the full-short, but there was now an urgent incentive to go for it – grey hair.The share of grey in the hair pile on the floor had increased with every visit to the barber. But as a younger sibling, it is easy to never feel old. And doesn’t the baseline for what counts as “old” shift with time? All that changed one Saturday morning last year, when staring into the mirror, the streaks of grey on my sides felt like a violent reality check.I tried a new shampoo, a different oil before accepting that this creeping sign of middle age was irreversible. I had resisted treating life as a rat race, but that Saturday reminded me of the milestones I had missed along the way. The Germans call this Torschlusspanik — the fear of time running out.My search to counter this introduced me to Kairos — a Greek concept exploring the qualitative aspects of time. As opposed to Chronos, Kairos seeks to feel time and not count it. I interpreted it as an invitation to meander and seek moments that made life worthwhile.The salon in the center in Vlore was compact and spotless. My mumblings in Albanian made no impression on the barber. Deja vu, I thought. I sat on the chair, resigned. As I watched him drape the black sheet around me, I realised his haircut was close to what I wanted. Pointing to his crown I gave a thumbs up. He nodded in approval. I smiled at this unexpected breakthrough.The smile made way for horror as he trimmed the sides clean. Seeing my scalp bare to the skin was a novel experience. Would this betray my midlife crisis to the world? As I was dreading what would come next, an elderly man barged in. Of course — there had to be a coffee break.The espresso helped me realise my miscalculation: the barber’s haircut was a few weeks old already. He was going for the full-short — I hadn’t realised how short it would be.After the espresso, the barber shed the violence of the trimmer. He poured himself into every remaining strand of hair on my scalp with the scissors. He redid the transitions from the sides to the crop multiple times — as if he was sculpting a masterpiece.“Grazie.” He nodded after an eternity of meticulousness.There wasn’t a speck of grey on the sides. I nodded back with a smile.The taste of coffee fresh on my tongue, illusions of my youth restored, I walked out with my head held high, blending into a sea of Albanian men, all seemingly sporting the full-short.A mundane ritual had given me a Kairos moment — a fleeting moment of feeling integrated in an alien land.Anoop Asranna is a sustainable energy engineer who loves nature, reading, and photography.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.