Every now and then there is a particularly meaningful little nugget of advice to be found in the newspaper comics. This morning’s paper had one such great bit of advice in the comic strip Nancy. In the strip, Sluggo (Nancy’s boyfriend) encounters Nancy who is walking around with a smile on her face. He comments that she looks happy; to which Nancy replies that she woke up in a blue mood. Sluggo asks, “Why then the smile?” Nancy replies that sometimes she just puts a smile on her face and waits for her mood to catch up.
What great advice. All of us have days when we wake up in a funk or a blue mood. If we do nothing to change that, we’d probably walk around all day looking down or sad or mad. Our face would reflect our mood and 
people would notice. They might ask what is wrong or they may just avoid you altogether, because they don’t want you to bring them down, too.
If you wake up and realize that you’re in a dark mood, try out what Nancy does and put on a happy face. Greet others with a smile and a cheerful hello. I suspect that you’ll find fairly quickly that your mood does catch up with the happier mood that you are portraying to others. At least they will be happy to see you and maybe stop to chat. Don’t slam them with your real, underlying foul mood. Keep up the charade. Soon the mood that you are projecting to others will overcome the mood that that was inside you. Your mood will catch up to your smile. You’ll feel better and you will not have effected (one might say infected) others with your initial foul mood 
If you’re like me just considering the irony involved in putting a smiley face on a foul mood might be enough to break that mood. Even if all you can muster is a smirk, that’s still better than a frown. So get ahead of your moods and emotions and get them pointed in a happy direction. You’ll feel so much better when they catch up to the smile on your face.
Have a great and smiley day!
