The Weekly Smile – 10/15/2018 – Welcome Back! #weeklysmile

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On the 13th of September, 2017, I posted the last Weekly Smile. It was a long run – 88 of The Weekly Smile plus a month of The Daily Smile. That post was the last, that is, for the first run of The Smile.

Guess what?

The Weekly Smile is back!

I thought a lot about what I was going to make this first post about. I have had many smiles over the last week or two. I visited family, saw my siblings and parents. I finished a couple of large projects at work and am finally starting one I’ve been waiting for for almost two years. I got out and did things outside. I met some writing goals. There is a lot to smile about!

But for this one, I decided to Smile about smiling. :)

Have you noticed that emotions can be infectious? If you feel bad and frown, the world frowns with you. But if you smile? Even if you have to try hard to bring up that smile, it does make you feel better. And then the people around you catch it. And they smile, which causes that feedback loop to kick in. Your smile becomes more sincere. Everyone feels just a little better. Or perhaps a lot better.

I am an ultra-introvert and often hardly notice the people around me as I move around in my own little world. But when I do see someone, I try to smile. They usually smile back. If I get close enough, I put my smile into words. “Good morning!” “Hi!” “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Whatever. And people usually respond in kind. They walk away smiling. And so do I. It is part of our shared humanity.

That’s what the Weekly Smile is about. It is bumping into someone on the Internet, smiling and wishing them a good day. Perhaps they will feel a bit better and smile at someone in return, who will feel better and then smile themselves. And so on.

Anyway, this is the first week after just a little over a year break. I hope you can join in! Here is list of “rules” and guiding ideas. If you don’t have time to read it right now, just remember that this is an exercise to spread positivity. Don’t smile about the misfortune of others. Don’t smile in a way to excludes others. Make sure a 12 year old can read it.

And remember, the Smile can be anything, large or small. Nothing, nothing at all is too small for a Smile!

To join in, write a post to share your smile and then leave a comment on this post with a link to your smile. Or, if you prefer, do a pingback to this post (pingback = have a link from your post to this one). Next week i will compile all of the Smiles and do a separate post of them.

Try to use the hashtag #WeeklySmile when you use Twitter or other social media that uses hashtags. I searched Twitter and found that #weeklysmile had been used only a handful of times back in 2012 and 2013. It hasn’t been used since. So it’s ours! I also registered it on Twubs.

You can use the graphic at the top. It is the official graphic for the event.

Now go out there and find something to smile about! :)

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“There are days I go in search of the kind, compassionate, loving and beautiful. Despite what we sometimes see on the news, FB and elsewhere, there is much more beauty in the world than ugliness, much more kindness than hate or cruelty. Perhaps we should all have a goal to make at least one person smile every day.”