I have a friend who used to tell me that she wanted to see me “smile from the inside.” I thought about asking her how to “smile from the inside,” because I do smile a lot, and they aren’t just fake look-how-happy-I-am-smiles. Isn’t that what smiling from the inside means? And anyways, how could she possibly tell if my smile was coming from the inside?
Later that week, I kept trying to make myself remember when I felt like I was “smiling from the inside” Was it there when my team was hitting a perfect routine in front of our coaches? Was it there when I looked in the mirror to see that the gigantic zit on my chin had faded? I went into a philosophical mania trying to distinguish my “inside” smiles from my “not inside” smiles.
I finally asked her what she meant when she said she wanted me to “smile from the inside.” I thought she was going to make herself more clear, but instead, she just crept her chair over a little closer to mine and said, “I want you to be really happy.”
Heck, I could have explained “smiling from the inside” to someone if I knew that’s all you had to say. She’s lucky I like her enough to think almost anything she said was cool.
I forgot about the “smiling on the inside” bogus for awhile. I was, for the most part, really happy. And no one can be happy all the time. I was happy when my dog finally learned how to run up the big slide instead of just the small one. And I was really happy when my roommate came home with ice cream for the both of us.
It wasn’t until one night when this same friend and I went out dancing in 6 inch heels and slick black crop tops that she gave me a sideways glance and said, “You look really happy.” I didn’t realize I was smiling until she said this. In fact, my cheeks were already hot and sore from being crunched together, so I imagine I must have been smiling for a long time before realizing it. I was actually, really smiling.
That night wasn’t the first time I had smiled from the inside, nor did it clear my confusion of whether or not I have been smiling from the inside before, but I think it gave me a better understanding of what she was talking about. Smiling from the inside is not something that you can give to someone, or something that you can explain, or even something you can know you are doing at the time.
To me, smiling from the inside is a feeling of pure contentment. It’s the magical moment of pure joy that hardly comes around but we’re just happy. It’s this freedom of our souls to just be and not worry about how much we have lost in this world, and how much longer this happiness is going to last. And we’re suspended in this grin, or even a midst of tears, and we literally can’t do anything else because we are so fricken happy. The moment is unproductive, the moment is rare, and the moment slips away before we even realize we’re in it. The moment just is.
