Smiling and Laughing with Our Fellow Human Beings

One of my favorite quotes in the world is, "what sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity." I always thought it was by Anon. Awhile back I got a quote book and the author of that quote is listed. Of course I don't recall the name of that author. I will have to look it up and edit this.

Anyway, today at work I was trying to work with one of our patients. She is a sweet lady and she has a beautiful singing voice. She also has some dementia. We were in our OT room, and she would start to break out in soft and gently singing. We sang part of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", part of "Climb Every Mountain" and a couple other songs. The songs were calming to her and helped her do a little better with her exercises, so we encouraged the singing. Luckily, our rehab tech who has a great voice, contributed to the singing.

Meanwhile, one reason I was trying to sing softly is another patient and his visitor were on the opposite side of the room. Suddenly my patient stopped singing, looked at the other patient's visitor and exclaimed, "that man is laughing at us!" I looked at the visitor and before I could say anything, that man replied, "no I'm not, I'm smiling at you!"

It made me think of how we sometimes think people are being mean when they aren't. How many times have you thought someone was laughing at you when in reality, they were smiling at you?

So many times in my life, I have been uplifted and strengthed by someone who smiled at me. I hope I can do better at smiling at other people, as well as living and serving them in such a way that they will want to smile.