One Small Smile at a Time

     I do this silly thing. Whenever I pull into a four-way stop at the same time as another car, I always wave the other car through, but not as a simple matter of courtesy. I've developed this notion after noticing how enjoyable it was to see the driver of the other wave in acknowledgement, that I was giving the other person an opportunity to perform a simple act of gratitude.

     I've read many things about the effects of gratitude over the years. Including one research study by a Nobel winning Japanese scientist who lists it as one of the things that can actually alter our DNA for the good. In the last years of my teaching career, I used to try to incorporate one or two of the things on his list into the openings minutes of every class to make sure the kids had a daily dose of something positive. (You'd be surprised at how many didn't.) I would show videos of amazing deeds, great natural beauty, and things that would provoke a sense of awe in the hearts of most human beings. I noticed though that a great many of the kids, as young as they were,  were already so jaded and seem to lack the ability to know how something as simple as a few moments of silence where you breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly could strengthen your resilience, or even, in a small way, to affirm that living life was even worth the effort.

       I've been obsessed lately in discovering small things hidden in my past. For example, I used to play whiffle ball in my front yard every night with the kid the across the street. This went on for a couple of years. Then one night I went inside, turned off the porch light, and never played whiffle ball again. Instead, a few months later, I woke up in an alley at night after huffing some cleaning fluid with a couple of buddies from school. I remember their eyes when I awoke. They looked like little dots of light, alien like. We staggered up and walked to the end of the alley where the street light was, and I stood there for moment in the light, knowing I had done something very profound and that I had come out into a different reality than the one I occupied when I had entered the alley

       About half the guys in our neighborhood soon followed me off the cliff. I can remember thinking how tragically unhip the ones were who didn't. They didn't know how to roll a joint, or how to listen to Jimi Hendrix the way I did. I also know that they had a similar, yet opposite opinions about me and my friends whenever they saw us, shaking their heads sadly and mumbling something to each other as we passed.

     When I see those boys now as men, I often want to tell them how sorry I was for passing judgement and how much I admire those who held their ground against the cultural tsunami that swept across the continent during the Sixties and which has since steadily eroded away the consensus we once shared about what constitutes right and wrong, good and evil. The thing is, I've never had to apologize, and neither have they. In our old age, the things that used to divide us have simply vanished and have drawn us even closer in some mysterious way.

     I have been trying to read C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity for the longest time, and it is not that long, or difficult a book to read. It's seems that every time I pick it up, I want to start at the beginning, and then I can't read more than a few pages before I have to put it down and think about what it says. Then I'm off and running coming up with extrapolations on my own, trying to squeeze every bit of meaning out of those words like a NBA owner trying to milk their fans out of the nickels in their kid's piggy bank.

     Lewis was an atheist who found his way back to the presence of God. There is something about that which speaks volumes to a boy who once exchanged the joys of playing front yard whiffle ball for the pleasure of waking up hung-over with a futile hope that I wouldn't be able to remember what I had done the night before.

     The book is collection of speeches that they asked Lewis to give to RAF members at the beginning of WWII, many, if not most, of whom, were fated to die in the ensuing conflict and the effort to defend the what was most valuable of what we know as Western Values against the evil of the Nazi regime. It was basically an intelligent, good humored, account of the importance of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Lewis didn't think the battles taking place in the killing fields of Europe at the time were any more important than the daily battles that each and every one of us faces when we get up in the morning and must confront a life that always seems to be 'getting on our last nerve.' That, and, of course, the need to pass out hope in face of the daily bombardment.

    There were no ordinary people in Lewis's universe. In his eyes, we are all children of God; some more rebellious than others but each deciding, in the battlefields of our own hearts what kind of human being we want to be. In the words of Kathleen Norris, who wrote the brilliant forward to the edition I'm reading, Lewis believed that in Christianity as he understood it, "we open ourselves to imaginatively transform our lives in such a way that evil diminishes and good prevails." To me that seems to say that far from trying to be perfect, "we ride that horse that we rode in on  as far as we can," and all that God requires is that we do the best that we can.

      I watched my Dad as he got older engage in the practice of bringing out the light. My mom would send him into a store for bacon and eggs to cook breakfast, and he would emerge thirty minutes later after talking to every person he knew in the store. Dad told some of the dumbest jokes I ever heard, and he always blew the punch line, and it constantly amazed me just how willing and happy most people were to smile at them dumb jokes. It was like they were just waiting for someone to pull it out of them. Then, it always made me think, that two of the saddest things in the world must be an unused smile, or a laugh being held in reserve.

     I've never been a garrulous person. My name actually means Dark Water referencing someone who always looks beneath the surface of things and has proven to be a strangely prescient assessment of my character, but I'm making the effort to talk more to the cashiers and the servers, and the people I run into as I go about my day. I've learned to believe that most people like to engage, most people like to smile, and most people like to feel and receive gratitude. I don't mean I'm emptying out my list of grievances or dumping all my problems out on them in a space of five minutes. Just saying 'how are you", or 'hello in there'.

      And I always say 'thanks' and 'you're welcome' because I like it when people tell me 'thanks' and 'you're welcome.' I believe that teaching common courtesy in school would be one of the best things we could do to began to solve America's educational problems. 

    And I know we're not going to win the war against evil by always arguing with our neighbors. That, in fact, is one of the diabolical acts of evil ever conceived, turning us against each other over the most trivial of things.

     I do, however, think, and maybe little naively though that we might have a better chance if we convert people one smile at a time, and that small acts of kindness would be a good place to start.