Be smiley :-)
- What should I do for a better life?
- Do not cry it makes things sad. Be smiley, it makes them joyful.
Children always have straight answers, making them more simple and therefore convincing. Hiding and toning down one’s feelings isn’t recognized as a good practice though. If things are sad, it might be worth crying, if only to ease the pain a bit. But! If things are sad, at one point or another one wants to brighten up. Life goes on as folks say. In any case, that’s what we can wish to all the suffering souls out there. And this particular answer might give some hints as to what to do to help them and ourselves.
It’s widely supported throughout literature. For example, Anne Franck wrote in The Diary of a Young Girl: « I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains». She’s telling us that a choice can be made, that we can shift our focus from the crying to the smiling. One got to love her optimism! We can only wish to be this wise, as a young child, or at any other age actually. Beauty can be hard to perceive at times though. That’s where the above answer shows its full power. We can be the source of beauty, we can make it appear. Or, in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh «Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.»
It even has some support in science. Studies have shown the possibility to be primed for happiness. And a 1988 study by Strack, Martin, and Stepper¹ reports a successful test of the so-called «facial feedback hypothesis». Namely, having people smile before looking at cartoons, make them find the drawings funnier. Truth be told the conclusions of this study (as of many others in the field of psychology) are hard to replicate and therefore disputed². Still, smiling is a gravity-defying gesture, same as throwing our arms in the air when winning, which are known³ to be the body language equivalent of saying «I’m happy»!
Finally, beauty contests are all about smiling, aren’t they? And everybody knows that tons of wisdom lie in beauty pageants! A crying contest wouldn’t attract much of an audience. Unless it’s used to repel demons of course⁴. Smiling is a social lubricant, it smoothens our interactions with others. One can see a smile as a gift offered to other people, cheering them up (or as an opportunity to show our teeth). A smile is a present alleviating the suffering of our fellow humans (or a very efficient mechanism to get what we want, the result of millions of years of evolution). Maybe both? We need to remember the words of Mark Twain: «To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.» Being smiley when meeting someone’s gaze, is being a positive mirror. It’s being energy refuel for others, with the hope for reciprocation, with the hope for a virtuous and energizing feedback loop, pushing us forward, looking for and at «the beauty that still remains».
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2. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-smiling-really-make-you-happier/
3. Try it for yourself, you’ll see ;)
4. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/naki-sumo-baby-crying-contest
