say cheese, dammit
One of my students is a sweet man whose early onset Parkinson’s symptoms are increasing. Instead of waiting quietly for the symptoms to take over his life, he has taken a very inspiring approach of radical participation in his own life. He remains very active as a means of keeping his mind connected to the space of his own skin. He practices yoga, plays squash and is always mentioning in passing a number of other activities he completed since the last time I’ve seen him in class.
The other night he said that after his most recent visit to the neurologist, he has been practicing smiling.
“Most of the time, I don’t realize that I’m not smiling,” he said to me, then paused to think. He looked up at me and flashed me a beautiful, full-on smile.
It looked good on him, that whole-hearted smile. It was completely contagious, too.
That smile has got me thinking – how hard is it to smile a lot of the time? I like to play a game of “smile at passers-by” while walking down the sidewalk. And it’s quite possibly one of the most difficult things for me to do. Sharing a smile with a stranger is very intimate and uncomfortable, especially if you are not necessarily feeling particularly jolly that day.
Smiling in front of a camera is nearly impossible for millions of folks. Last Friday at öm time Denver, Peggy Dyer of One Million Faces photographed 139 different faces that came through the studio. Peggy has a way of putting even unwilling participants completely at ease on the other side of the camera lense – but even with so many faces, there were so many more who flat-out refused to have their picture taken. Some people were even a little snippy when I tried to charm them into participating. There was absolutely no way they would get in front of a camera and share their smile with the world.
Smile. Do it – right now. What does it feel like to smile at your computer? Anyone who watches me reply to emails knows that I smile silently to the person I am emailing. It is my way of making sure my response is genuine.
Why is smiling so hard? What are you afraid you’ll say with your smile that you wouldn’t want a stranger to know? Feel joy on the outside by connecting from the inside and make yourself vulnerable enough to give others permission to smile back.
The greatest feeling in the world is when I pass someone on the street and they smile so genuinely at me that it catches me off guard – and I blush and giggle the whole rest of my walk.