22 Jun Today I just smiled

Today, I was feeling in a bit of a funk. I was doing things I typically enjoy, but not getting any satisfaction out of them. (This included planting new flowers in my front window box to replace the last batch of plants that looked great when I put them in but never flowered again after that. What’s up with that?)

Then I had a fun, and admittedly slightly silly idea — I decided to smile for no “reason” whatsoever. I just smiled. And then I kept smiling while people were talking to me, even when they were finished. I smiled as they walked away from my desk. Then I smiled at my computer screen again. I heard my son come home and went upstairs to talk to him with a smile on my face. He was half-way through his dinner but instead of finishing it, he was stretched out over two dining room chairs reading a book. Normally I would sternly tell him to sit up and finish his dinner. Instead, I just smiled at him. I hugged him awkwardly while he was lying there, and he mostly ignored me while he was reading, and then I just smiled as I walked away from him.

I notice that I usually connect smiling with something that has already happened –a joke, something pleasant happening, a call from a friend. But today, I’m smiling ahead of time. Maybe I will find humor in something that would not have made me laugh if I hadn’t already been smiling. Maybe people will be kinder to me when they see me because I meet them with a smile.

Have you ever seen someone walking down the street, smiling? Don’t you usually think that they are listening to a good song on their iPod or they just saw a friend they knew, or that something else had just happened to make them smile? Doesn’t it seem a bit out of place to see one person walking along with a smile for no reason? Why? Why should that seem so “weird?” Don’t we all say we want happiness, and with that, wouldn’t there be a lot of smiling going on?

And now this smile is stuck on my face. Seriously. I feel a lightness in my cheeks that almost makes me want to laugh. I feel like something good HAS happened, only, I don’t know what. But I don’t care, because I still FEEL like something good has happened.

I envision myself doing the next thing and I see a smile on my face. I’m going to keep smiling for a while longer and watch what happens.

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