I really like this poem by Spike Milligan:
Smiling is infectious
You catch it like the flu,
When someone smiled at me today
I started smiling too.
I walked around the corner
And someone saw me grin,
When he smiled
I realised I had passed it on to him.
I thought about the smile
And then realised its worth,
A single smile like mine
Could travel round the earth.
So if you feel a smile begin
Don’t leave it undetected,
Start an epidemic
And get the world infected.
I decided the other day when I went out for my walk that I would smile at everyone and see what happened. I probably chose a bad day to try this experiment as the weather wasn’t very good and there were not too many people about.
The first two ladies I met didn’t look at me as they were so busy talking to each other. The next person I met was a man who sort of smiled back. The next person was a younger lady who was walking her dog. I smiled at both and got a smile back and a wag of a tail from the dog. Next were a couple of children who were probably wondering why this old woman was smiling at them. Next was a man who avoided eye contact and then an elderly couple who smiled at me before I could smile at them.
This wasn’t a scientific exercise but it kept me occupied when out on a not very nice day. But wouldn’t it be good to have more smiling people? There’s so much strife and sadness in the world and I realise that for some there’s not much to smile about.
Perhaps we could try to smile and see how many people we can infect. I also believe that it takes many more muscles to smile than to frown!