Finding Your Smile in Life

There are important reasons to smile.

Researchers say that when our smiling muscles contract, a signal is sent back to the brain that increases those happy hormones (endorphins) plus serotonin, that neurotransmitter that modulates mood and affects cognition, learning, and memory.

When our brains are happy, life is good. We live longer, our moods are better, we feel less stress, and we are drawn more to people who smile and they to us.

There is a picture of my mother’s family — 13 children and her mom and dad — that lived in a small town in southern Illinois. The picture is dated about 1939.

Curiously, there’s not much smiling in that family. Maybe three of them a sliver of a smile.

It would be easy in this day of psycho-analytical populism to attribute the lack of smiles to a dysfunctional family, which by all accounts it was. Grandpa was so afraid of his wife that sometimes he hid out in the corn field. A favorite aunt used every excuse possible to spend the night at the home of a woman who ran the drug store. An uncle had sleepless nights most of his life from the unpredictable terror in the home.

So, maybe not much to smile about.

There may be other reasons for a lack of smiles prior to the early 1940’s. The history of portraits, going back…