Smileology!

One early morning this week, walking from St Leonards to Glyne Gap, the sun high in the sky, HOT journalist, Zelly Restorick, was filled with a sense of lovingness and goodwill towards all who crossed her path.

This manifested itself with a smile aimed at everyone I passed by. However, after a while, I couldn’t help but notice that the majority of my smiles were being rejected in one way or another.

How strange it feels to smile at someone and see them catch your eye and look away. Or look through you. Or fix their eyes on some distant point on the horizon. Or concentrate their attention on personal technological entertainment devices.

It puzzles me when I see a fellow human wanderer up ahead – and we are the only people in sight – if we walk past each other without acknowledgement of our mutual existence. What a strange land I live in, I ponder… Lots of individual human islands, floating by, without recognition of our shared space on the planet.

If I smile and it is not reciprocated, I wonder what has happened inside the other person’s mind. What is their interpretation of my smile or greeting? Do they fear that it might be the prelude to some further unwanted connection? Are they suspicious of my motives? Do they imagine I want something in return? Do they think: ‘Ignore her, she might want something’? Or: ‘Pretend she doesn’t exist… she might want to talk’? Or ‘Warning! Grinning idiot ahead… avert eyes NOW!’?

Maybe I do secretly want something in response… although only a return, passing-by, smile. Nothing more. Merely a shared acknowledgement of our mutual alive-ness at this time, in this moment, in this space, on life’s roller coaster ride.

If someone smiles at me, I mostly find that my lips have returned the gesture before my conscious mind has had a chance to consider alternative options.

Later on in the afternoon, a group of families on a day out at the seaside passed by where I was sitting – and every one of them smiled at me, beamingly – and some  said ‘hello’. Some of them even smiled at me before I’d had a chance to smile at them. My heart was filled with warmth. My faith in humanity restored. Plus I felt like less of a weird, demented and peculiar person.

This morning, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and I was plodding, rather than happily strolling, into Hastings along the seafront. Looking up, I saw a face peeping out from one of the concrete shelters, smiling at me. It was lovely – and took me totally by surprise. I felt an instant uplift and immediately smiled back. Further along the promenade, out of the blue, a second person offered me their Gift of Smile – and I felt totally re-connected with my own smiling self.

Maybe our smiles come back to us not always at the time they are offered or from the people they are offered to, but sometimes when we need them the most? Maybe my smiles have cheered someone up along their way? I’d like to think so.

The universal language of genuine smile! A warmth generating signal to the soul.

I speak ‘Smile’!

Do you?

Also in: The HOT Planet