AW, COME ON, SMILE!
Think about it. The best part of your day is when you see someone smile.
A simple thing to do, it would seem. It happens more or less naturally but the human mind can forbid it to evolve. It's never seemed important enough for anyone to write books about it but but the mechanism if a smile -pert, sassy, insistent, and glowing – might be something worth such a study.
A smile can be a momentary thing of little immediate consequence or it can be a continuing affirmation good will, understanding and confidence . It is seen in lines of the face, in alignment of certain muscles and in the eyes even more so, perhaps. It is not associated simply with parting of the lips to show white teeth. That's the artificial smile you see so often when people try to smile for the camera. It is usually solicited by having the subjects say the words “cheese” or “money”. It doesn't work well because that is a smile achieved with the lips and without the support of the eyes.
Some people tend to have natural, face-forward show of dentures while others will have a crooked smile with one side down a bit than the the other. Both are acceptable, of course, since no one seems to have defined exactly what a smile should, or might, be. There are “wry” smiles telling the speaker that you know better than to believe what you are saying is true. Smiles can transmit all sorts of subtle messages, both cheerful and encouraging as well as damaging, curt and meant to hurt.
In a way, we might conclude that a smile is a secret the soul seeks to retain. That revealing spark of changes to be occurs first in the eye as an initial hint of what is about to take place in the face. A tiny uplift of the corners of the lips is start of the action.
To smile is to relax. Think of that when you become tired or simply frustrated with haste and complexities of your daily work schedule. Someone, long ago, decided that it took far more muscles of the face to execute a frown that it did to smile, so relax by taking the easy way out of being spent, useless and overburdened.
C'mon – smile!
A.L.M. November 23, 2003 [c379wds]
