Personal Smile Day

Today I saw a sad thing, a person I deal with sometimes came into my office and he was not a happy camper, not angry just profoundly sad. His demeanor was that of someone that had just given up on being happy, and had sunk into a demise of depression. This got me once again to thinking after he left, that perhaps we should all work a little harder to be happy. Even if we cant feel happy, ecstatic or joyful, perhaps just faking it by smiling at others might help to make us feel better. I have to admit that I on occasions am not the happiest, bright and shiny happy creature, so I will work on this as well.


I looked up happiness in the online wikipedia and found the following. It seems to me that we do have some pretty strict rules on being happy, some of them are beyond my reasoned understanding but the rules like everything else we learn are complicated and I suppose serve some useful purpose. I think the definition is not quite as satisfying as I would like, as I think we can all be fulfilled and happy most of the time if we work on it.

Happiness is a prolonged or lasting emotional or affective state that feels good or pleasing. Overlapping states or experiences associated with happiness include wellbeing, joy, sexual pleasure, delight, health, safety and love, while contrasting ones include suffering, sadness, grief, and pain.
Societies, religions, and individuals have various views on the nature of happiness and how to pursue it. (1)

It is my view that if we smile we feel better and it is infectious, others feel better and tend to smile at you when you smile at them, this in turn makes you feel better yet. A kind of self-fueling chain reaction.

The artist who made the smiley face said in a speech the following,

Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes the world seems big and filled with problems that are too hard to understand much less solve. We start to believe that we are too small to make a difference. But that’s not true. The truth is that every one of us has the ability to make a difference every day.” (2)

He even had launched a world smile day a great concept, so I am going to make this my personal smile day, how about you?





1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness
2.http://www.worldsmileday.com/