In three days I will be in the United States for exactly one month. It has been tough, but it does not matter that much, since I have already fallen in love with this place at first sight. Well, maybe not really first “sight” but rather first “smile.” On my first day here in Dickinson College and in Carlisle, everyone welcomed me with a smile. As I walked around campus and down the streets of Carlisle, I came across at lot of people, none of whom I had ever met before, and they smiled at me.

That was strange.

That was beautiful.

“This is so ridiculous and cheesy,” you must be thinking, but I am serious.

Some of you may have listened to the song “Mad World” by either Tears for Fears, Gary Jules (hands down my favorite), or by Adam Lambert. It is such an old and depressing song. It would be hard to imagine a world like that. However, that was the world with which I was more familiar. Even on the sunniest days, you would still feel like dark clouds were all over the places. No one would want to go outside unless they wanted to get caught in the rain. If you suddenly smile at people on the streets, they would return you with a funny look, like “What do you want from me?”, “What’s wrong with you?” or they wouldn’t even care at all. I loved it there, too, for I grew up there anyway. But it was a different kind of love. It was like a tragedy. That kind of explains why I fell in love here in this place, yet another kind of love.

I would think people have a lot of reasons to randomly smile with some strangers on the streets. One reason is that they might be having a good day. Maybe they just woke up from a nice dream, had a nice breakfast, full of energy and on their way to a job that they loved. Maybe their significant other might just have given them some sincere words that melt their heart. Maybe they had just gotten one of their daily problems, which had been a pain in their neck for a long while, resolved. Or… they might be having a bad day. The sky had just fallen down on them. They lost someone or something that was important to them and it broke their heart into pieces. All their work was left undone, for they didn’t have any motivation left for those things. Some of their relationships might have broken down. They decided to smile. Why, though, would they want to smile if their life had been so tragic? Because to smile was the only good thing that they could manage at that moment. It might be their only light to save the day. Last, in some other cases, people smile because they just want to make others happy. According to Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, “Emotions are contagious.” We tend to be easily affected by the people and the atmosphere surrounding us. When we see a tired person or are locked in a heavy atmosphere, our mood will change accordingly, meaning that you will begin to feel down and unmotivated. On the contrary, when we see others happy (or at least show to be), we will feel happier. That also explains why I love seeing others smile.

Of course, we are in no way obliged to smile all the time. Not everyone will think like me. Not everyone is going to smile away their bad days as if nothing happened or just because they want to make some strangers on the streets happy. There are also certain situations we need to keep control of our emotion to make sure it is appropriate. Nevertheless, I just want to say that it would be nice if we smiled as much as we could, since Alex Korb, Ph.D, a neuroscientist at UCLA ensured that, “Most people think that we smile because we feel happy, but it can go the other way as well: we feel happy because we smile.” It is all a brain and facial muscles thing, but it works. Connecting this to Carl Jung’s theory, even if our smile doesn’t make ourselves happy, it will make other people happy and that, in turn, boosts our mood. Can you imagine that, a world where everyone is happy? That will definitely be awesome.

Now, I myself am trying to smile as much as I can, mostly because, you might think I am a hypocrite at this point, I want to make people happy. Three years ago, I came across a post on Tumblr. The post stated something obvious, but it hit me hard: “I find it really scary that not everyone I know is going to die of old age. Some will get into accidents, some will get sick, some might encounter deaths by other beings, and some might even die by their own hand. And that terrifies me.” Recently, I lost someone really important. No one expected it to happen, but it did. That was when I truly got to understand the power of that post. We never know what other people are going through. Neither do we know when it is the last time we talk to someone, or when whether we are the last person to cross by them on the streets. Your smile could have, by the slimmest chance, saved them. I am sure some of you have once or twice had the kind of regrets like “I wish I treated [somebody] better. I wish I cared more about [somebody].” Most of the time, we take people for granted and regret it later. It is wrong. It is so wrong. That is the kind of regret that will haunt you for your whole life. You don’t want that. You won’t want that.

So just smile, people. Smile, because it helps. Be nice to yourself and also to other people.