On my way to work today, I counted smiles. It is a 20 minute drive from my home to office and as my husband took care of the driving part, I spent my time chatting with him and also counting the number of people that were smiling while travelling.
In the entire journey, I counted (hold you breath) two people who seemed to be smiling heartily. One was this young lady (somewhere in her early thirties) who was all wrapped up in a shawl and was presumably walking towards a bus stop alone. She must have remembered some incident that tickled her and made her smile spontaneously. Her whole face was lit up and she was oblivious to all around her, too engrossed in her own pleasant thoughts.
The second was the driver of a mini-bus carrying students to some school. He was chatting with the bus conductor who stood right behind the driver and they seemed to be sharing a joke. His smile was good natured and I was able to judge the type of joke that they shared. It was surely not lewd or slapstick. It seemed more like some funny situation that the conductor had landed himself in.
Two people in 20 minutes seem too less though. I must have come across hundreds of people during the journey but only two were smiling. This is a bit disappointing.
Anyways, if someone travelling in the opposite direction was also counting smiles today, they would have surely counted one and that was me. Counting smiles made me smile too and I added to the total number of people smiling during that moment. Cheers!!
A very fruitful exercise, really!!