Smile

It’s not like I’ve been obsessed by smiles but suddenly today I wanted to share something about them.

“Are you satisfied with your smile?” the dentists’ form asked when I had first arrived in the U.S. It completely flummoxed me. Was that a question worth answering? No. So I didn’t.

Another year, another dentist, same question. I could see they don’t get it. “I smile when I am happy. So naturally I am satisfied with my smile.’ I spelled it out finally. That settled it.

It’s true though- we can be discontented with our smile. A childhood fall has given me a broken front tooth and somehow we never got around to going to get it capped when I grew up – that had been the dentist’s recommendation. I’ve lived more than half my lifeand it’s only now that I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have got it tended to after all.

In the serious days of my youth, I’d wonder:Why do we have to smile for the camera?  Many posed smiles are fake. Where’s the smile in the eyes? That’s the one I go for. But that’s also when that uncapped tooth would thrust itself into my jaundiced eye.

And then those smileys entered our communication. Strange, isn’t it- how they have seeped into our online life? A colon and a parenthesis, and most browsers will insert a 🙂

Finally, Sujok. That has to be a part of most of my conversation. Back when I was struggling with a decision – to learn or not to learn – I read Prof. Park, Jae Woo’s book, Sujok Ki.

“Existence Spirit “SMILE”, he wrote “is the Essence of this Whole Universe.”

I smiled. And I was hooked.