i am not one to sing pretty phrases simply for the sake of putting on smiles. Though i do love smiles, and DO smile – a LOT (thanks mostly to you guys. You’re a hoot! ;-). I just don’t think that the experience of smiling is mandatory, and it can be exquisitely inappropriate, depending on timing and intent.
but smiling in order to achieve anything at all, simply slaps a mask on the joy that we already are. It becomes an application, like make-up. Like a word-processor. A means to an end.
And it will not achieve in the end what was already there in the beginning — the pure and naked joy that the mask’s very presence obscures.
unless of course, the mask wants to destroy itself. And why would it want to do that? After going through the bother of making itself up to begin with?
you can see how it’s a pickle!
some say you can ‘fake it till you make it,’ and encourage wearing a mask through all the thicks and thins — until sufficient joy is pumped into the four-chambered cistern to pour out naturally, at which time the mask can come off. And this may be valid, in theory. I’ll claim no expertise i don’t have (Well, i might – so you’ll have to watch me!). But it niggles me that at root is still held that smiling is a means to happiness. And i know beyond knowing that the only true means to happiness IS happiness, in its actual expansion and upwelling through a willing and open heart.
nothing else is really even true! It’s just a sad story wearing a mask. So i wonder why we would think it would be a gift to the world? Or ourselves?
and it seems that too, important steps are missed: the steps of identifying the obscurations and seeing how they are pinned into place. Then the arduous practice of unpinning them, over and over again, until you can do it with no hands in the dark hanging upside-down in a gunny-sack.
once you can do that, then just try to STOP smiling! And i guarantee, there will be plenty left over to share. REAL ones…
They’re QUITE contagious ;-)
daily grist 