I believe in the power of a smile, that superpowers are not always so super, and you have the opportunity to improve someone’s day every day.

Instead of walking around with an apathetic, non-expressive look on your face turn up the corners of your mouth and smile on your walk to class or through the baking isle of your local supermarket. You never know how your simple act of kindness will affect others.

If you simply have no interest in your impact on your fellow man, then smile for yourself. Even if sometimes it feels like you have nothing left to smile about. Smiling when you’re having a bad day is the best medication because it forces you to put things into perspective

I wish that someone had told me that sooner.

We go through so much of life dwelling on both the past and the future, never truly living in the moment. We fixate on the things we could have done better and the things we will have to do. This constant worry causes people to become irritable and unhappy.

What we as a collective group lack is empathy.

Yeah, okay, that guy cut you off. Maybe he’s rushing to the hospital to see a family member. So what if that old lady cut the line, it’s one person, you’ll still get rung up. Maybe she genuinely didn’t see you. We automatically assume the worst of people and sometimes that’s just not the case.

I don’t think I’ll ever really understand why it’s so easy to assume the worst and so much harder to assume the best. I would guess that we probably project our poor attitude onto others.

I’m no psychologist. Just a lowly college student.

Think about your moods. Why is it that bad days seem so much more common than the good ones? It’s at the point that we’re actually surprised when we wake up in a good mood!

But here’s the thing. Good moods are contagious and smiles are infectious. So if we really wanted it, everyday could be a good day.

I know that’s not realistic. There are going to be bad days, days that it feels like absolutely everything that could have gone wrong did. Maybe though, there was one nugget of goodness in that awful, no good, very bad day.

Maybe, just maybe, a stranger told you that you looked nice, even when you thought you didn’t. Maybe someone told you that you have pretty eyes, when you had forgotten, consumed by everything that was going poorly at the moment.

Compliments have the power to turn someone’s day around, and I think that’s been forgotten.

But we can try to change that, one person, one smile at a time.

I believe that we are all superheroes and some of us just have yet to discover that. We are all armed with the power of smiles and compliments and the ability to save people from their own gloom.