Smiles

Smiles.  When I was a child in the early sixties, the bright yellow Smiley face with its two black dots for eyes and a black half circle for a mouth, made its first appearance.  It wasn't long before that image had permeated my world.  Smiley decorated the covers of notebooks, was plastered on T-shirts, worn as jewellery, stuck on car bumpers, hung from VW mirrors, and splashed across bedspreads.  As the internet took hold in the eighties, Smiley morphed into the digital form of an emoticon, making regular appearances in online communication. It was to serve the purpose of trying to convey an emotional clue of cheerfulness and positive feelings, in correspondence where the possibility of misinterpretation abounds, since body language and other non verbal cues are absent.  Here's the thing.  Nothing beats a genuine smile, for both the giver and the recipient. Today, I will make a conscious effort to smile at a minimum of twenty people, knowing that all I risk is the possibility of uplifting myself, as well as others, who may also be feeling a little low on this grey day.