I’m a generally very positive and effervescent personality.
But we all struggle from time to time, and right now I’ve been struggling, a little. This whole year, since January really, has been an uphill hike and in the past 5 weeks (even more so in the past week and a half) it’s been particularly steep.
It’s just a struggle. I know even though it feels sometimes like it’s never going to end, it will. It hurts like hell. But! It will pass, just like everything else. And until then, I’ve decided the best way to deal with this is to focus on the positive, to make sure that I don’t take for granted all of the little smiles that occur in my day. So for 100 smiles (or perhaps 100 days of smiles? haven’t really decided yet…), I’m going to journal a little about them. 🙂
Why smiles?
Smiles are buoyant forces. Receiving one from someone on even the worst of days can cause the bubbles to rise to life in your chest.
Smiles are contagious. You can cause a cascade of happiness by creating a smile, and letting that smile generate more, and those create more, and so on. It’s exponential growth I tell ya!
And smiling is fun! In fact, after years of practice, I’ve found that sometimes just making yourself smile can change the way you feel, even for an instant.
Oh, did I mention…smiling is sexy! – scientists have proven that smiley wrinkles are entirely sexier than frownie wrinkles.
And why a blog? Because we all struggle. Although this whole thing is really more for me right now, I know I’m not the only person on this planet of 6+ billion that is struggling. So on the off chance someone else might read this I’m sharing my smiles, hoping to spread hope. 🙂
Smiling is my favorite. So without further delay, I present the first smiles of this project:
1.) I’ve been dealing with a lot of guilt, and quite of bit of the fallout going on is resultant from some bad decisions I’ve made. They didn’t seem like bad decisions at the time, but I guess that comes with the territory when you take chances: sometimes it comes back to bite you. So while my 20/20-hindsight-self has been beating pre-decision me up, my Mom noticed something I said about making bad decisions. Without knowing any of the details about any of these, she simply wrote to me “Even the worst decisions were made with good intentions.” So props to Mom for not only making me smile, but also helping me realize that maybe I shouldn’t be beating myself up so much.
2.) Watching the movie Castaway. The ultimate “survivor movie.” I love Tom Hanks in this, and it actually contains one of my favorite quotes, when he is talking about how he thought he was stuck on that island, never going to leave, and was going to die there. He was utterly hopeless but kept holding on, and one day, the tide brought him a sail. He’d finally returned only to found he’d lost everything he knew: “But now I know what I’ve got to do. I’ve got to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise, and who knows what the tide will bring?”
One Hundred Smiles 