Smile and the World Smiles With You

I found myself immersed in a sea of people last week, adrift in the ebb and flow of humanity at O’Hare Airport. Sometimes it felt as if I was swimming against a riptide of passengers intent on sweeping me the wrong direction.

As I eased through the waves of people in the concourse, I noticed no one made eye contact with anyone else even though the masses streamed past each other. Why is this?

I’m guilty of it too, mostly, adhering to some unspoken societal norm, an unwritten code that we must avert our eyes when we meet others, especially amidst a throng of people.

Is it too much work to make eye contact and smile at so many people? Maybe that behavior makes sense when large numbers are present, but it happens in small groups too. I’ve been in retail stores, with only three or four shoppers around and we all act as if we’re invisible to each other as if each one is the lone person in the store. Somehow, we only seem visible to the store workers, and they ignore us sometimes as well.

What are the rules? When is it okay to acknowledge others in this world when you don’t know the people? I think there’s a formula to it. As the number of people in a location goes up, the radius becomes smaller before we’ll acknowledge a person who slips within that radius.

For example, if two people pass each other within forty feet on a beach at 6 a.m. with no other people are around, they most likely will acknowledge each other and smile. But pack that beach with 100 people walking the sand later in the day and those same two people will probably not make eye contact and smile even if they pass within 5 feet. I’m sure we are seeing each other, we just pretend we don’t.

Again, what’s going on here? What drives this behavior?

I’ll offer one possibility. Many of us are afraid of each other. Set aside that sometimes we could be afraid someone will do us harm. I’m saying we are afraid of each other in another way, that if we attempt to make eye contact and smile at the other person but they don’t smile back to acknowledge our existence, then we feel hurt. We feel rejected. At best, we’ll be ignored and at worst, be thought a weirdo.

That’s what it’s mostly about, I think. Protecting ourselves.

If a person doesn’t return the smile, then it’s easy to overanalyze ourselves and believe we may not be worthy or lovable or cool. But the irony is, it has nothing to do with us. If someone doesn’t return a smile, then they are the one with the issue whether it’s insecurity, preoccupation, or sadness. Or maybe they simply aren't nice individuals. But are those good reasons to not make the effort to acknowledge our fellow humans and smile at them?

I don’t think so.

When I returned to O’Hare for my flight home, I tried an experiment. I planned to smile at as many people as possible. Let them think me a weirdo for smiling if they wanted. What did I care? Humanity could have been at stake here. Maybe I could singlehandedly reverse this insidious trend of pretending each other doesn’t exist. Perhaps smiling at people would make them smile at others and we’d get a smiling wave rippling outward from the epicenter of O’Hare.

To be honest, I was nervous. I braced for rejection and the distinct possibility no one would return a smile, or even care.

I was wrong.

As I smiled at the stream of people moving toward me, many faces in the crowd shifted from stern to sunny. Eyes twinkled. Smiles bounced back at me. Yes, some people had heads down or eyes locked on some point behind me, but more people smiled than I would have guessed. And there was a pleasant side effect. Anyone who caught my smile tried a little harder to move out of my way, to offer a well-meant concession of their space in the concourse walkway. I moved much easier through the crowds this time.

But then I wondered something else. Had the issue been with me the whole time? Could my face have been stuck in sour mode? Had I looked stern and un-smile-worthy to others? Had I needed to change my inside expression to affect the outside one so I could discover a different world where people did acknowledge and smile at each other? Is it possible the world is only a reflection of what we are experiencing inside? I’ve decided to ditch the exercise as an experiment and change it to a full-time habit. It’s amazing how many smiling people there are in the world now.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you.” But it works for smiling too. The next time you are in a crowd or passing people on the sidewalk, fight the urge to ignore them. Become a Smile Giver instead. I bet you’ll be surprised at how many you get back.

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This post almost ended with that last sentence. But there was something I forgot, an old event in my life that never entered my mind until I completed this post.

I’ve read that everything we need to be happy is already inside of us, that we already know those truths… we just need reminders. It must be true. We must need constant reminders because I learned this post’s entire lesson over twenty years ago. Yesterday it popped into my head.

Like the sea of humanity at O’Hare, I found myself in another sea almost twenty-one years ago: the Black Sea. I’d just turned twenty-one years old in the middle of that expanse of water, as a sailor in the US Navy. My ship, the USS Peterson, was tracking a new Soviet aircraft carrier, gathering intelligence while operating in the area. At the time, the cold war still fumed and the Berlin wall had yet to fall. Communism reigned in the Soviet Union with Reagan proclaiming it the “Evil Empire.”

We spent several days testing how close we could get to the Russian ship until one point our vessel made a run at the Soviet carrier, slipping as close as possible to take photos. Over forty members of our crew had gathered on the port side to see the Soviet ship up close. The tension was palpable as we wondered what would happen. As we pulled alongside, a large group of their crew had done the same.

We watched them, their wide eyes mirroring our own. I was shocked they weren’t what I was expecting. I remember thinking, “They’re a bunch of kids like us.” I had expected a crew of crusty old men who looked more like pirates than the young boys across from us. The Soviet carrier’s surface-to-surface guns whirred to life as the huge barrels turned toward our ship, their country sending a “friendly” hello to ours.

Our ship began to veer away. As it did, one of our youngest sailors, an eighteen-year-old from the mid-west, inched his hand upward and gave a small wave. All the Russians, every single one, began leaping up and down, smiling, cheering, waving wildly to us. Our group erupted in a return cheer, smiles on every face, arms slicing back and forth through the air until the two ships were so far apart the groups could barely see one another.

As we sailed away, I realized our concerns had been vapor. Our leaders had convinced us Russians were bad people, the enemy. But that perception was wrong. Perhaps their government was bad at the time, but the majority of its people weren’t. They almost never are.

In the US, where we are supposed to be on the same side, the same soil, I still believe many of us are afraid of each other. But we wouldn’t be if we’d simply smile and wave at each other a little more.