When Good News Looks Like Lemon Ice Cream

Sharing positive vibes across three continents

The sun is out in Johannesburg, hesitating over London, and blazing in São Paulo. On a weekday morning, three small rectangles light up on a screen: Janita in South Africa, Bruce in Britain, and Rosie in Brazil. They greet each other the way old friends do, overlapping questions, laughter, and the familiar dance of “Can you hear me now?” and then, almost without planning it, they start talking about good news.

Not the headline kind. The human kind: clear lungs after a brutal flu. A sunny winter’s day that ignores the forecast. A free work party earned by carrying boxes. An ice cream shared with sisters on the beach.

If you’ve ever felt like the news cycle is one long anxiety loop, this conversation feels like sneaking away to a quiet café where people still ask, gently: What made you smile this week?

The Art of Feeling Better (Slowly)

Rosie arrives at the conversation with a story that starts in pain.

The week before, she’d tried to push through a vicious flu. Fever. Cough that wouldn’t stop. Pain “in my head, my back, everything.” She went to work anyway, because that’s what people do when November arrives loaded with deadlines and expectations. Within hours, her colleagues at the Board of Education in Guarulhos were telling her the truth she was trying to ignore: “Why you come here? Go to the doctor.”

So she did. Two injections, medicine for five days, strict orders to rest. She went home, slept the entire afternoon, and woke up at 4 p.m. feeling, not perfect, but better. Better enough to notice something essential:

She’d been exhausted for a long time. The weather in São Paulo was see-sawing between 30°C and 15°C. Work was heavy. The year-end evaluations were coming, more phases, more pressure, more performance. “When you get November, October, we have a lot of things to do,” she says. The body, she realised, was simply saying what she hadn’t said out loud: Enough.

Janita listens from Johannesburg, nodding. She’s heard this before; she’s seen it in her own community this past winter, when strange flus lingered for weeks. Her mother, too, needed extra time to recover. Doctors talked about viruses and changing seasons. No one seemed certain, but everyone seemed tired.

Bruce, in Britain, frames it in his dry, understated way. He jokes that holidays require more recovery time than they give you, and that public health data now is hazy at best. But he circles back to something quieter: “You need good data to make good judgments,” he says—about health, about risk, about life.

What Counts as “Good News,” Really?

After Bruce leaves for an appointment (“I’ll think about some good news for you if I can”), the conversation shifts. Janita names the theme for the day: good news and positive vibes.

Good news, she suggests, can be anything: the sun shining when the forecast promised rain, a promotion at work, a friend’s wedding, a baby born, a birthday remembered. It can also be something as small as a stranger’s smile, a shared joke, or the fact that the tech actually works during a global Zoom call.

Bruce, before signing off, had already pointed to one of those microscopic blessings: “Another bit of good news is that the technology is working.” Anyone who’s been frozen mid-sentence on a video call knows how good that can feel.

Rosie’s most recent good news is disarmingly simple: a birthday trip to the beach.

She took four days off and went to the coast with her sisters and her sister-in-law—a woman she describes with unfiltered warmth: “She’s really, really, really positive… when I am with her, she makes me smile with simple things.”

No grand plans. No luxury itinerary. Just beach air, sister talk, and the joy of being around someone whose optimism is contagious.

Janita brings in a quote from Harry Potter:

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light.”

She asks Rosie what she thinks. Rosie doesn’t reference magic or philosophy. She goes straight to practice: keep smiling, even during problems; protect your mental health; remember that your mind needs care as much as your body. She and her colleagues are under intense scrutiny this year, three-phase evaluations, school visits tracked by a system that turns numbers red if you don’t show up, and a requirement to film themselves evaluating a class.

“It’s ridiculous,” she laughs, half-serious, half-resigned.

But then she describes what they’ve done with that pressure. In their office, they joke about it. They tease each other in the WhatsApp group: “If you want, you can buy a video: how to make a video, great promotion!” They turn fear into humour, deadlines into memes.

When life hands them a terrifying evaluation rubric, they make lemonade—and jokes.

The Ripple Effect of Joy

Janita introduces a phrase: the ripple effect of joy.

When you’re happy, she says, you share it. And when you share good news; a free party, a day off, a successful video, even just a pretty sky; you don’t just feel better yourself. You change the emotional temperature around you.

Rosie knows this intuitively. When she has good news, she wants to spread it: “If you are feeling well… you share with someone. ‘Oh, you don’t know, we will do a great video,’ or ‘Next week I will stay three days at my home.’… You can infect—contagious—with good news.”

She laughs at her own word choice—“infect” feels too medical, too close to flu—but the idea is perfect. Joy is contagious. Good news spreads like a healthy virus.

Janita asks a provocative question:

Does focusing on good news make us less prepared for bad news?

Rosie doesn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” she says—and then she complicates it.

If you think only about bad situations, she explains, your emotions absorb that negativity. You stay stuck in problems instead of solutions. For her, good news isn’t denial; it’s strategy. When she faces a problem, she doesn’t want to camp in the drama. She wants to move to the question: What can I do? “I don’t have a problem, I want the solution,” she says.
“If I have one, two or three options, I try the first. If it doesn’t work, I go to the second.”

Janita adds her own layer. She doesn’t believe good news makes us naïve; she believes bad news is often simply… unexpected. We wake up hoping for a good day, a positive day, and then something hits us from the side. A diagnosis. A job cut. A phone call at an odd hour. No amount of positive thinking completely prepares us for those moments, but the habit of looking for light matters when the room suddenly darkens.

Tiny Celebrations: Ice Cream, Parties, and Pastéis

The conversation turns playful. Janita asks:

How can teachers, friends, or family create more opportunities to celebrate good news?

Rosie’s answer is delightfully specific:
Go for hot chocolate. Walk in the park. Eat Japanese food. Invite people over for a barbecue. Celebrate life for no reason other than: we are here, together.

At work, they’re planning an end-of-year party. The good news? No one has to pay.

All year, they’ve been lifting and carrying boxes—collecting exam papers from managers, moving materials—and that labour has been converted into party funds. “We already have two or three thousand to spend in our party,” she says, eyes bright even through a screen.

Last year it rained, the roof leaked, and they had to huddle inside. This year her boss is insisting: “The weather will be fine.” That, too, is good news.

Janita and Rosie then drift into a quietly delicious tangent: ice cream.

If good news were a flavour of ice cream, what would it be?

For Rosie, it’s rum and raisin, the one she buys at the supermarket, the taste she keeps coming back to. For Janita, it depends. At home, she loves the classic trio, chocolate, strawberry, vanilla. But at a proper ice cream shop, with the hum of freezers and the clink of metal scoops, she becomes someone else: the taster.

She remembers a bakery that also sold gelato, the kind where you’re allowed to try everything first. Tart lemon that cuts through the heat. Pistachio, hazelnut, coffee. Mango and pineapple. Bubble gum. Even a black charcoal ice cream, strange and intriguing.

Rosie responds with her own memory of a gelateria in Brazil’s north, with flavours inspired by local fruits she doesn’t find at home in São Paulo. She lights up recalling how she wanted to try them all.

Here, good news isn’t abstract. It looks like bright scoops in small cups, citrus against your tongue, laughter over who chose the better flavour.

Weather, Animals and Other Metaphors for Hope

Janita leans into the playful mood and introduces a set of “silly questions” that aren’t silly at all.

If good news was an animal, what animal would it be?

Rosie doesn’t even pause. A squirrel.

The first time she saw one was in Tampa, Florida, studying English. She remembers it walking across a garden—small, light, almost comedic—and the memory still makes her smile years later. Squirrels, with their quick movements and fluffy tails, feel like embodied joy: fast, fleeting, unexpected.

Janita chooses an owl. Not for the spooky folk stories that say an owl on your roof predicts death, but for another reason: wisdom. She likes to imagine that if an owl lands near you, maybe it’s bringing good news and perspective, a reminder to see in the dark.

If good news were a kind of weather?

Here, Rosie is certain: the kind of day she’s having now. Sun. Blue skies. White clouds. The sort of day that makes you want to be outside, in motion. She admits rain is good for nature—and wonderful for long naps on Sunday afternoons—but sunlight is what makes her heart lift.

Janita mirrors this. She loves sunshine, warmth, a clear blue sky. It’s the kind of weather that makes good news feel even better.

If good news came with a free snack?

Rosie splits the answer:
If salty, then tiny pastries—pastéis—golden and hot.
If sweet, then lots of small chocolates.

Jnita chooses crisps with a Mexican chilli flavour, and something called wine gums: jelly sweets a bit like jelly beans, but without the hard shell. They’re chewy, colourful, playful—like edible confetti.

These “silly questions” are doing something subtle. They are translating abstract positivity into sensory anchors. If you were to close your eyes now and think of “good news,” what do you see? A squirrel? An owl? A lemon ice cream? A sky so blue it feels like a promise?

Creating Our Own Summer

As the session draws to a close, Janita offers a gentle summary. All around us, she reminds Rosie, there is good news—if we decide to see it:

• A body slowly healing after illness.
• A boss who spends party money on the team.
• A WhatsApp group that turns evaluation anxiety into memes.
• Sisters on a beach.
• A squirrel in a foreign garden.
• A student somewhere in the city who will have new shoes and sweets because a stranger cared enough to give.

Rosie thanks her for “this nice and smile morning.” She says that after their talk, she is starting her day “in a positive way… with good vibes.” You can hear the shift in her voice: the weight is still there—evaluations, responsibilities, 81 schools to oversee—but now it is balanced by something else. Lightness. Perspective. Options.

There is one more participant in this broader circle, even though he isn’t on this particular call: Frank, travelling somewhere between Istanbul and South Korea, promising to look for good news wherever the Wi-Fi works. In previous conversations, he’s talked about the idea of “creating our own summer” even when the forecast says otherwise—finding inner warmth when the external weather, literal or metaphorical, is bleak.

It’s a fitting image to hold as the screen begins to empty and the workday rushes back in.

Because maybe that is the quiet invitation of this global conversation:
Not to deny the cold seasons, the flu, the stress, the evaluation systems that turn numbers red, the unexpected bad news. But to practice, again and again, the small, radical act of turning on a light.

To notice the squirrel. To choose the lemon ice cream. To joke about the scary video. To carry the boxes and then dance at the free party.

To ask yourself, gently:

What is the good news I can see today? And how can I share it?

Some seasons of life feel like winter. But as Frank likes to say, we still have the power to create our own summer—to cultivate an inner climate of warmth, humour, and hope, no matter what the weather report predicts.

So as you close this page, take a breath and look around you.

What’s one small piece of good news in your life right now?
And what would happen if you let it ripple?