How do you feel when someone smilingly greets you in the bus at a time when you are exhausted, hungry and anxious to get to your hall or hostel and enjoy the comfort it has to offer? I bet you will feel some happiness, gather your last strength and smilingly respond.
And if the person is a talking type, you can easily strike a conversation and before you realize you have forgotten about your tiredness. A smiling face they say is a messenger of good will and it brightens the lives of people who see it. If there is a simple gesture that costs nothing but gives much then it is a smile.
The fact is everybody likes a smiling face and tends to respond connectively to it. Which is to say the kind of face you present will trigger people to give you the same gesture: you can refer to it as garbage in garbage out.
When you stand behind the mirror to look at your best self don’t you smile? If smiling complements your best self then why don’t you smile to people to show your best self. In all my learning life and little experience I have seen interviews won, relationships started, friends made, elections won and opportunities opened for those who showed a smiling face .
On a typical day on campus, people move to and fro libraries, departments, food joints, halls, hostels, fields and lecture theaters with a weary face that can qualify for ugly face of the year without realizing that smiling is a problem easer and can bring boredom or tiredness down to its feet.
In 1960 during the presidential election at US, former president John. F Kennedy was known as ‘the ladies’ man’; in an interview of most women, they confirmed they liked the way he always smiled; to them his smile gave them hope of a better future. It was no wonder he won the election easily. That is the power of smiles. The Chinese has a proverb that says ‘a man without a smiling face must not open a shop’ an ideology that seems to suggest that life is about relating to people hence to make a mark of influence you got to smile. A poet has this to say about a smile:
A smile enriches those who give without impoverishing those who receive
It happens in a flash but its memory last forever
The rich can’t get along without it and the poor is richer for it benefits
It creates happiness at the home, fosters goodwill in business
And it is a countersign of friends
It is a rest to the weary, daylight to the discourage and natures best antidote to free trouble
Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed or stolen, for it is something that is of no earthly good to anybody till it is given away freely.
As you move from one part of this community to the other, put your smiling face on for its benefits has no boundaries. With this explicit knowledge of a smile, may I ask you to leave one of yours on this site? For no one is in need of smile than the one that ask you to to give. MESSI
