Today Is a Verb: Open the Gift of NowExemplo

Share a Smile

How I loved my Aunt Marianne, affectionately known as Auntie to a host of children who lived in our small town in mid-century America. Auntie was a beloved elementary school teacher who was admired and respected by adults, teens, and children alike.

Auntie read Pippi Longstocking and Caddie Woodlawn to me on long summer afternoons while we sat in her hammock underneath the shade of the elm tree in her backyard. She was my first piano teacher, my first church choir director, and one of my Latin teachers. Auntie taught me to love the written word, choral music, and molasses cookies. In the second grade, when my teacher was concerned about my penmanship, my mother sent me to Auntie’s house every Saturday morning to learn how to form my letters correctly and beautifully. It’s a gift I don’t take for granted even today.

As the years passed by, and Auntie entered her last decade of life this side of eternity, she began to lose her effervescent memory. She talked about children’s books to people in the grocery store, was no longer able to find her way home from her teaching assignments, and voraciously gathered up the condiments in restaurants, hiding them in her oversized purse. Still, she knew how to smile. She would repeat to everyone she encountered, “If someone has lost a smile, give him one of yours.”

• A smile can turn a bad day into a good day.
• A smile can fight off depression and weariness of the soul.
• A smile is another way of saying, “I see you. You are important.”
• A smile is a gift to the one who sees it, and it makes the giver even more attractive.
• When you smile at the world, it smiles back at you in return.
• If you want to change the world, just smile at a stranger.
• A smile has unseen power to cure the afflictions of almost any soul.

Meaningful Moment

You must make smiling part of your daily routine—you simply must! Resolve to smile at strangers, at people you meet daily, and at your dearest of friends.

Daily Declaration

“I declare that I will smile at strangers and at children; I will smile outside and inside. I will smile in public and in private. In doing so, I just might change the world!”