Do Your Eyes Smile

There is something called the Duchenne smile. It’s a facial expression that involves not only your mouth, but your eyes as well. It indicates genuine enjoyment and positive emotions when your eyes get involved with your smile.
You can tell the people with crows feet have been happy, a lot. 
It’s called this because the neurologist who first identified it was named Duchenne. 
I think we’ve all been across from somebody who smiles and it reaches their eyes. 
We have also been with someone when it doesn’t.
It seems forced in some way. Maybe it’s unhappiness that lingers down inside.
But, there is a way to fake it until you make it, so to speak. 
Albert Brooks says that if you put a pencil horizontally in your mouth, grip it with your molars and bite down. You just have to hold it for twenty seconds and you will feel markedly better for the next hour. How cool is that?
I don’t know about you, but my moodiness runs deep.
Joy can sometimes feel elusive. And that’s usually when I feel annoyed.
I love the idea of being able to bite down on a pencil and change that in twenty seconds. Sure beats biting my tongue.
Which is what I should do when I’m annoyed but I rarely do.
What if we could all default our moods to joy?
I’m not talking about happiness. Happiness is a great feeling, but it is fleeting.
Happiness is way too reliant on certain things having to be a certain way.  It’s difficult to be happy without conditions.
But joy? 
What if joy is all there is to it?
What if it’s what we are here to be? 
Who we are, as joy.
Something that runs from the inside in a constant state of being. 
Joy as a way of being.
To be here as joy.
Dr. Barbara Holmes posed the question, “Suppose that at the entrance to heaven there is a scale, not a scale to weigh good and bad deeds but a scale to measure joy. Suppose our passage into the next life will not be determined by the number of souls saved, sermons preached, or holiness pursued. Just joy.”
Let's use this scale in our lives, everyday. And let our eyes smile at all the joy we will begin to see, everywhere.