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| Photography by Judy Ebeling 2015 |
On a particular visit to my parents’ home in Rhode Island, where sunrises and sunsets tinted light that streamed in large, paned windows, my mother and I had had a confrontation. From inside the bathroom, I heard her say to me through the door, “If you would just smile more.” From her viewpoint, I had a home and a husband who I loved, so why wouldn’t I be smiling. From my viewpoint I had nothing to smile about. And I didn’t like her admonishing me through the closed door. The cause of my suffering need not be detailed. Her practicality and extroverted personality were different from my immature view of life from which I too often became overwhelmed by emotion.
This year, though, her well-meant effort to help me flowered through my reading of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Be Free Wherever You Are, and although his words are more lyrical, hers were the truth.*
“Breathing in, I smile … . [T]here are over three hundred muscles in your face. When you are angry or fearful, these muscles tense up. … If you know how to breathe in and produce a smile, however, the tension will disappear … . Sometimes when I am alone in my room in the dark, I practice smiling to myself. I do this to be kind to myself, to take good care of myself, to love myself. I know that if I cannot take care of myself, I cannot take care of anyone else.”
My realization is, “We can let go of what we didn’t accept in the past but have since understood, or we can keep truths repressed, and therefore unresolved and potentially able to reappear.”
* Be Free Where You Are, Thich Nhat Hanh. From a talk given at the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown MD in 1999. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk and social activist. He served as Chair of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace Accords and was nominated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize.