smile more

Hey…I’m smiling again! Let’s see if I can keep this up, then I’m checking it done.

I need to remind myself that I need to do this more than ever. Maybe if I smile more, I can find more and more reasons to be ok with myself.

Yeah.

a lot of my office mates are cranky today. Basically because of the heavy rain that went on for four hours straight, causing flash floods in some areas of the city. I guess some of them got stranded somewhere and some of them couldn’t get a cab to get to work on time.

This means that I haven’t been getting any smiles back from the people I’ve been smiling to. I mostly get grimaces. Normally, this would definitely offend me in a way. But I figured that they just probably had a hard time already.

So I’ll just smile FOR them. Hopefully, it’ll rub off.

I noticed something a few days ago. People, especially my co-workers, seem particularly happy when they see me. I get hellos and smiles when before there was none. Instead of the usual curt nod, people stop for a while and chat, asking me how my day was, the class I’m teaching, and my general well being.

Weird. And then I realized, I’ve been doing the same thing. I’ve been smiling to almost everyone I know. This includes the people I meet in the hallways, the security guards, people i’ve been sharing the elevators with for the last 3 years. I’ve been asking how they were doing, if there was something that they need help with.

This goal definitely has positive returns.

This is becoming more of a challenge everyday. As soon as I wake up, I resolve to be happy and to smile more. But then something crappy comes along like people from work making unreasonable demands, petty disagreements with your sibling, and this takes the cake, having a major fight with your girlfriend. It’s hard to bounce back and to smile when that sort of thing happens. Especially if it’s a fight that TOTALLY blindsided me because it came out of NOWHERE!

OK. That felt much better.

I was in a grumpy mood yesterday and early today, and I ended up taking it out on random people. To the class I teach, to my co-workers, and to random people who end up inside the elevator with me. Not good. So I’m taking a deep breath and start again.

I just noticed that when you smile even if you don’t feel like smiling, you start feeling better already.