Expressions. Faces. Closed. Defensive. No one cares about anything except themselves. Alone. Have to take care of myself. Sadness. The world on my shoulders.

One so often sees folks whose facial expressions tell a sad story, the story that says “no one cares about me, and I’m too busy caring for myself to have the time to care about someone else”.  There’s a self-defensiveness, and a hardness, a lack of compassion, there because of the sense that one is alone in this world.

I think a lot of us realize how much a smile changes one’s day, for the smiler and the recipient of the smile.  If we learn to make kindness an automatic thing, to catch those negative thoughts before we, unwittingly, allow them to take hold, and keep an overall sunny disposition, we would be multiplying the goodness in our world exponentially.

Can we keep that up?  We can, if we realize that we are not impoverished by giving, nor are we enriched by withholding.  What a wonderful, caring realization.

Zed