Commencing Peace & Smiling More

The profoundly personally uplifting and extra-personally revitalizing effects of smiling are clear. We should be interested in authentically smiling more. It makes others feel happy, but essence of a good smiling exchange lies in the motive. The intention can’t be to smile for the other person because then you’re going to want to elicit a certain reaction and set yourself up for failure. When you demand a reaction from another person (ideally a positive one) your mood automatically gets transferred to the other party. If you smile for the other person and they frown or don’t smile back, or do something undesirable, it could cripple your mood. I am reluctant to smile for fear of that “encroaching smile” where someone is pushing all this energy on you and you feel obligated to reciprocate the smile. The encroaching smile is usually superficial. As Alfred Lord Tennyson put it: ”A smile abroad is often a scowl at home.” Such disingenuous smiles are precisely what we should fear and never engage, because to appear outwardly falsely benign, while being critical and loathing internally, really just tarnishes the unlimited uplifting possibility of a smile as a gift.

Unlike the Tennyson encroaching smile, a genuine truthful smile is a gift.

So smiling from within is actually rare because it’s almost “indifferent”. Smiling from within is when you’re smiling and just happen to be looking in someone’s direction, but it’s the best kind of smile because in addition to being genuine, it’s impenetrably strong, unwavering, and it’s very secure. It actually boils down to a fairly complicated process when you think about it. Mother Teresa writes:

“Peace begins with a smile. Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, beautiful thing.”

A smile means a lot. If you don’t do the encroaching smile, it sounds a little over-hyped, but if you’ve received an authentic beaming facial gesture, you can recollect its potency. Mother Teresa says the opposite of war -- peace – commences instantly with the presence of a smile. An authentic genuine smile means all that – peace, beauty, a gift – and more, but it’s difficult to create those sincere, authentic smiles. So there's the encroaching "Tennyson" smile and the truthful genuine smile; we want the latter. But with practice you can learn that impenetrably unwavering smile and it is fun to utilize and share because you aren’t trying to create a reaction, but you almost usually do.