Smile like you mean it

So finally, here we go:

SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

You can always tell when the smile is forced. I’ve got numerous pictures for proof. There’s one of my cousin forcing his lips so wide apart so that his lower teeth reflects the flash of the camera. His cheeks squash his questioning eyes and he looks more constipated than happy.

“Say cheese.”

We love pictures with happy people don’t we? It’s most important that the picture looks good. Whether the people in it smile because they mean it is kind of secondary. Something we can deal with later so long as we’ve all got wide pageant smiles in the picture. After all, we don’t want our friends on facebook to tag unsmiling faces of us, do we?

“Give us a smile.”

Parents love to ask this of their children especially when they’re down. Honestly, I don’t think kids appreciate it very much. It’s not the best feeling in the world to force a smile through your tears. I don’t think it’s a very pretty scene either. But it makes our parents happy, so we do it.

It’s funny how our world loves its smiles. Something in a smile makes its recipient feel better somehow. Service with a smile is a skill we are taught to learn. Smiling has become a service that we perform a lot of the times, for others.

But we also get the real smiles. The ones that creep up on you. You know, the ones the photographers love for their candour and frankness and just humanness. They’re unplanned. They make you look silly especially when you’re smiling to yourself and it’s visible to the strangers in the same room. The same one that plasters itself across your face when you take a sip of that aromatic French vanilla latte or a scoop of crème brulee.

And how about the ones you get when you remember something funny? When you feel like you’re the happiest person in the world. Or when there’s so much to be grateful for-your family, your friends, that dress you got on sale, the wind today, a goodnight’s sleep, your football club winning, a surprise visit from a friend, and just being alive. Or when you discover something new, when you truly love what you’re doing when there are things to look forward to.

“I can’t help but smile.”

These are the smiles you smile for yourself. The type no amount of force or coercion can stifle. These are the smiles that actually mean something. They tell you something real about the giver, and its recipient is usually, always infected.