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Little Things, Big Love — and Why I Keep Coming Back to Bali
By Mihar Dias May 2026
Forty years. Four decades. That is not a marriage — that is a civilisation. Complete with its own history, its own wars, its own monuments, and its own inexplicable traditions that outsiders would never fully understand.
Photo by Mihar Dias
And yet, when I try to explain how we got here, I keep returning to an African proverb so simple it almost sounds like something you'd find stitched on a throw pillow: “Little things make a woman love a man in a big way.”
Not grand gestures. Not dramatic declarations. Not a diamond the size of a small republic. Little things.
I believe it. Forty years has taught me to believe it the way you believe in gravity — not because you understand it, but because every time you test it, you hit the floor.
February 9th, Bali. Our anniversary. We were back on the island that seems to have quietly appointed itself the keeper of our most meaningful moments. There is something almost conspiratorial about Bali — the light, the unhurried air, the way time moves differently there, as though the island itself is in on the joke that the rest of the world is moving too fast.
We did not do anything spectacular. We had a meal. We watched the evening do what Bali evenings do. We talked — really talked — the way you only can with someone who has been reading the same book as you for forty years and still finds new sentences to discuss.
That, I have come to understand, is the little thing. Showing up. Choosing the same person again, not out of habit, but out of something quieter and more deliberate than habit. The proverb does not say grand things make a woman love a man. It says little things. Daily effort. Sustained attention. The unremarkable made remarkable by repetition.
Forty years of little things. That is the whole architecture.
And then May arrived, and Bali called again — this time not for quiet reflection, but for something gloriously, chaotically opposite.
A friend, Dr. Marco turned 72. And he did not turn 72 quietly in a restaurant with a cake that had too many candles. He turned 72 in Bali, at the fabulous Villa Kalimaya of Seminyak, surrounded by people from fifteen different countries. Fifteen. I counted, partly in admiration and partly in sheer anthropological fascination.
Here is what strikes me about a party like that: you are suddenly in a room where the little things are everything, because the big things — language, culture, background, the particular way your society taught you to say hello — are all different. What remains is laughter at the right moment, a refilled glass before you had to ask, someone making sure you were not standing alone in the corner.
Little things. The proverb travels well, it turns out.
A man who can build friendships across fifteen countries by his 72nd birthday has spent a lifetime practicing exactly what the African wisdom prescribes — attention, care, the daily accumulation of small gestures that compound, over decades, into something no grand speech could ever manufacture.
Dr. Marco with his friends and a portrait painted by a Plastic Surgeon from Brazil. Photo credit Mihar Dias
There is a version of modern life that is obsessed with the milestone — the anniversary dinner, the birthday party, the big number. And yes, forty years deserves its dinner. Seventy-two deserves its party.
But what I have learned — slowly, stubbornly, occasionally at great personal cost — is that the milestones are merely the receipts. The real transaction happened on all the ordinary days in between. The Tuesday evenings. The forgettable Wednesday mornings. The moments nobody photographed because nothing was happening, except everything was.
Bali, for me, has become a place where I remember this. Maybe that is why I keep returning. It is not escape. It is recalibration.
Forty years of marriage, two trips to Bali in the same year, a table of friends from fifteen countries singing to a man who has spent seven decades collecting people worth keeping — if that is not a masterclass in the little things, I do not know what is.
Photo credit: Mihar Dias
The proverb is right. It has always been right.
We just needed forty years, and a couple of trips to Bali, to finally sit still long enough to understand it.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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