Smiling

I've always been an unusually smiley person. In elementary school, my classmates would compete with each other to get me to stop smiling (specifically, to frown), and I would see this as a challenge to smile for as long as possible. I'm often smiling for no reason, while walking down the street or in class or talking to people.

Why? Well, I'd definitely attribute a large portion of it to my parents being really optimistic people. They'd never get discouraged (or at least not show it), smile through the pain (metaphorically) -- they saw pessimism and the defeatist mindset as the one true enemy. From a young age, I was taught not to complain -- to be thankful for what I have rather than distraught by what I didn't. In my household, sadness was the one thing that didn't belong.

It does materialize in suboptimal ways sometimes though -- when an actually serious matter is being discussed, and the last thing I should be doing is smiling, I sometimes have the subconscious urge to smile. Or when I'm just walking down the street, sometimes I start smiling for barely any reason at all and probably appear like a lunatic, and the issue is that when I start smiling, it's not always easy to just stop. At these times, there is only one resort. One singular thing that I can do, and only one, and it has worked every time for my entire life.

I imagine my mother's voice saying in a very serious tone to 5-year-old me, "you could be great someday". "Great" as in, successful or accomplished or glorious; not "great" as in awesome or fabulous. Because 5-year-old me had a limited vocabulary, my parents would use this word to symbolize the goal: achieving things through hard work that oneself is proud of. This word was used predominantly when I misbehaved, as a way to remind me of what possibilities existed out there, if only I were to focus and chase them. My parents would never say that I was "great", nor would they say that anyone were "great" for that matter (except for maybe Albert Einstein), because its meaning was so vast that no human individual could capture it. The goal was not a physical entity, but rather an idea; somewhat like infinity.

And so, traveling back in time 13 years is the only thing that can stop me from smiling like a lunatic when I really shouldn't be. (By the way, it doesn't work if anyone else says "you could be great someday" -- I'd most definitely start laughing. It has to be my mother's voice from 13 years ago, because sentences can be interpreted in many different ways depending on who says them, and there is one singular interpretation that works like magic.) My smile is immediately replaced with a serious and contemplative expression, because the future, and one's life goals, are not humorous. It is a completely serious topic, full of things that can only be obtained if one focuses and chases them. The physical world, or whatever I was smiling/laughing about, immediately disappears and is replaced with infinity.