Smile Season

Face it; we have all had days dragging our feet through the mud. Situations in life are beyond our control, and it is essential to keep perspective. We can justify victimizing ourselves for all of our character flaws — which depending on who you ask, might be considered accountability — or embrace our faults to grasp the reality of our potential strength. It is much easier to bury our fears and go into a mode of self-preservation than face the hard facts.

See, reverse psychology has all fingers pointing in one direction; when we are at our worst, we try to cheer ourselves up by finding shortcomings in others. However, the adverse effects are that we end up projecting instead. All the things that tend to bother us in others are simply the traits we don’t like in ourselves. Vices are blinders that we choose to engage in with the hopes of numbing whatever truth it is we refuse to see or have others find out.

The point of living is to be happy, but how can we do this when there is upheaval taking place at the root of all people? Only when we convince ourselves of our value do others see it too. It is natural to want possessions with a high price tag; the same concept applies to people. It is vain to say, but using this chain of thought, life is a store, and we are simply products.

People get picked up, inspected, used, and bought all the time. The difference is that people have emotions; we must learn to separate the trivial consumers from those who will make the best use of our time. We get so lost in understanding the cycle that we conform to putting ourselves on sale just to be inspected with the hope of being purchased. We try to be like every other material, but it takes away our happiness.

Sometimes it is nice to let it all go; the fear of not being seen should not inhibit your ability to take a gamble within reason. To quote the wise words of Mark Zuckerberg, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing quickly,

the only strategy guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” Embrace the door of opportunity, and it will lead you down a rabbit hole of possibilities.

There’s always a reason to smile. You just have to look into the looking glass, which is the world around you, and recognize all the wondrous contingencies that come with rolling the dice, being yourself, and not getting swept up in the pity party of self-deprecation.