How PositiveMinds Began
It began with a sentence I did not believe.
“I am doing well, by the grace of God.”
A colleague said those words to me one morning in March 2020. She had come into my office to say hello, as she often did. On most days, she brought warmth into the room before the conversation had even started. She was lively, smiling and full of energy, but that morning the smile was gone.
Her words insisted that she was fine, yet everything else said otherwise. Her voice was tense, her face looked tired, and even the way she stood seemed to carry something she did not want to name. I asked again, more gently, and after a short silence she said, “It’s Covid. It’s putting me in this state.”
I remember that moment because it named something many people were carrying but not always saying aloud. Covid had entered our homes, our work, our routines and our conversations. It had brought illness and loss, but also a quieter kind of heaviness. Fear had become ordinary, distance had become familiar, and even a simple greeting could arrive with hidden weight.
After she left my office, I kept thinking about what I had seen in her face. I knew I could not remove what people were carrying. I could not change the news, end the isolation or make uncertainty disappear. But I wondered whether I could do one small thing against the negativity that was settling around us, not to pretend the darkness was absent, but to leave a little light beside it.
The next morning, I wrote a short positive story and shared it with my colleagues. It was not a lesson, a speech or a piece of advice. It was simply a small reflection from ordinary life, the kind that notices a gesture, a memory, a word or a quiet act of kindness that might otherwise pass unseen. The following morning, I shared another, and then another.
I did not have a strategy or a calendar. I was only trying to begin the day with something that reminded us that fear was not the only thing still alive around us. Slowly, something changed. Colleagues began to reply with stories of their own: a moment of courage, a kindness remembered, a touch of humour in a place where we had stopped expecting it.
The pandemic had not changed, and the fear had not disappeared. Yet the room felt different. We were no longer speaking only about what had been lost. A different kind of attention had entered our conversations, and with it came a little more room to breathe.
That was when I realised the stories no longer belonged only to our team. After about a month, I created a small blog and called it PositiveMinds. At first, it was just a place to continue sharing the mini-stories, but over time the space began to grow. The stories became longer reflections, some reflections became visual metaphors, and new collections appeared, each one carrying the same quiet intention in a different form.
Some ideas stayed close to words, while others seemed to ask for an image. A door closing while someone continued to wait. A burden carried by one person after others had put it down. A hand trying to fill two glasses at once and leaving both nearly empty. A plant given responsibility without the water it needed to grow.
These images said things I could not always say directly. They invited the reader to pause without telling them what to think. They left room for recognition. That is how Tilé slowly emerged.
Tilé means sun in Bambara. In the visual world of PositiveMinds, Tilé became the quiet human presence inside the image. Sometimes Tilé appears as a simple, faceless figure. Sometimes only a hand, a burden, a chair, an opening or the result of a choice remains.
Tilé was never meant to represent one person. The figure is simple because the space must remain open. Tilé holds the place in the image where any of us may recognise something of ourselves.
Looking back, I do not think PositiveMinds began because I decided to write. I think it began because one conversation reminded me of something I have seen many times in life:
People do not always need someone to solve what they are carrying. Sometimes they need something that helps them keep seeing courage, kindness, humour, meaning or hope while they carry it.
That is still what PositiveMinds tries to offer. Not answers, but a little light.