While not intended to be a resolution, I’ve been keeping a smile journal since the beginning of the year. My hope is to deliberately notice those moments when I catch myself smiling at something. There are a fair number of neuroscience and psychology studies that indicate smiling is good for us. For a brief history of the study of smiling, go here.
The type of smile I try to notice is the Duchenne smile. It’s almost reflexive and can’t be forced. Studies have shown while some smiles are certainly fake – the contractions around the eyes (the ones that cause crow’s feet) are much more difficult to control than the muscles around the mouth. I try to focus on the smiles where I can feel my cheeks lift and my eyes squint. It’s a sign of joy. As a side note, this also explains why I have a such a strong dislike for dating profiles with smoothed out and filtered pictures and such a strong like soft eyes and slight wrinkles that show a lifetime of emotion: smiling and joy, humor and sorrow.
Recent entries in my smile journal include seeing a cat’s head peeking out above a window sill, watching a child stomp and splash in a puddle, a man riding a bike with a bubble machine on the back of it – making a wall of bubbles as a he rode past, a tiny dog in a tiny dog sweater trotting along, remembering the way my friend John gives a “what’s up” head nod when he approaches people, and the opening lines to the poem “Nobility” by Tony Hoagland, “In the 3,000 letters written by Virginia Woolf between 1930 and 1941, / she does not once express anxiety about the size of her rear end.”
I prefer the “smile journal” to a gratitude journal because there’s less thinking involved. I don’t want to think about why things brought me joy, or worse, spend my time at the end of a day trying to brainstorm a short list of those things in life for which I’m grateful… To me, that practice feels a little too much like a prayer and a little too focused on the people and things in our lives as opposed to the many wonders that surround our lives. While I believe there’s a clear benefit in practicing gratitude, I prefer to focus on spontaneous joy as my antidote to life’s many petty frustrations.
While it’s only been a month since I started the “smile journal,” I’ve noticed two changes in my thinking and several patterns among the things that make me smile. The first change in my thinking is that, it’s gotten easier to notice things of wonder and joy which, in turn, seems to have had the effect of increasing the number times I notice/experience wonder and joy. The second change in my thinking is that I’m finding myself wanting to slow down and be more deliberate in some of my actions. I’ve experienced this every time I’ve set out to do something with deliberate regularity. A few years ago, I practiced painting an enso circle every day for a month or two. As I practiced, I found a type of calm in the preparation: setting out the paints, getting the notebook ready, setting up my space. The preparation often took several minutes while the actual painting took a few seconds. Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to bring that type of concentration to some of my routine daily tasks (making coffee, brushing my teeth, spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast). It’s a type of presence that marries thought with action. I can’t say for sure that this is a result of noticing when I smile, but it stands to reason that when we begin to pay close attention to the world around us, we also notice the many times when we’re on auto-pilot doing one thing while thinking about other things. As for the patterns in the things that make me smile: natural beauty (flowers, colors, water, light), seeing children play, anything that is both novel and slightly humorous, other people experiencing joy, animals, artistic endeavors (poetry, art, architecture), and my own internal thinking/sense of humor (I crack myself up a lot).
If there’s an additional benefit to all of this, it’s that by keeping a record of it, I can revisit and recall many, not all, of these moments. I can see the bubbles from the guy on the bike with the bubble machine, I know where I was sitting and what the weather was like when I read the Tony Hoagland poem, I can hear the kids screaming during gym class on the black top as they ran a high-stepping relay race.
In doing this, I don’t have any anticipated outcomes. I don’t have a prescribed time period for this practice. It feels beneficial, and informative, so I’ll hold on to it for a while – which, in and of itself, also makes me smile.