A Stranger’s Smile

Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day

I’ve had a bad week.

Things have mounted up and gotten on top of me and I emerged from the weekend in a dismal state of angst. But this morning a tiny yet impactful thing happened. A stranger smiled at me.  

For the past week I’ve been taking Prednisolone which, if you haven’t been on it before, is an awful drug which you should avoid if possible. 

I’m taking it because I have some lower back issues which are making it difficult for me to exercise.  Prednisolone is a corticosteroid hormone which reduces inflammation. The idea is I take it for ten days to settle my back down and then work with my osteopath to strengthen the muscles.  

Okay, sounds reasonable – always do what the doctor orders right? Hell no. But in this case, I was willing to give it a go. Exercise, especially running, is my great anxiety antidote. So when I can’t run, I get upset. 

The problem with the Prednisolone is that it is a synthetic version of cortisol – which is the body’s natural stress hormone. The irony: I was already stressed because I couldn’t exercise, and now the medication I’m taking so that I can exercise again is making me even more stressed. 

And the side effects go beyond anxiety – they also include water retention and weight gain, nausea, insomnia, irritability, increased appetite, and general malaise. In short – it just screws you up. It’s like a cross between caffeine overload and that restless loathing that churns through you at the onset of viral illness.  

To make matters worse, we’ve just found out that we may soon have to move apartments because the landlord is looking to sell up. We love our apartment – it is our home, and to move will be emotionally draining and practically inconvenient.

But the crowning ordeal of my scattered week has been a mysterious low frequency hum in the wall behind the headboard of my bed which is most noticeable in the dead of night – perfect for a guy already dealing with drug-induced insomnia. This maddening sound first manifested on the same day I began taking the Prednisolone leading me to suspect it was some rare auditory hallucination side effect. Nevertheless for eight days and nights I have been scouring the apartment and its surrounding environs for a potential electrical or mechanical source – creeping around in my underwear with my ear to the wall like a crazy person, even going so far as to disconnect a light on the exterior of the building – all to no avail¹

Poor me – First-World problems huh?  

I’m not looking for sympathy. The point of this long preamble is to illustrate how a confluence of relatively insignificant stimuli can drive a person up the wall.  

There’s no question – I have been acting erratically. More than once this week my girlfriend has told me to “chill out with the roid rage”. But it’s difficult to temper one’s behaviour when in the grips of a powerful prescription drug. I’ll tell you one thing for free – I won’t be taking this stuff ever again. As a side note, doesn’t this speak to the glaring paradox of our modern medical establishment? So often it seems the cure is worse than the disease. 

Such has been the chaos in my head, that I failed to write an article for my blog over the weekend. It wasn’t for lack of ideas, I was just unable to arrange them properly – the mental equivalent of attempting to wade through a bog in gumboots that are two sizes too big.  

It is important that I write at least one article per week. Subscribers expect to receive regular material, and from a personal perspective – I need the routine.  

So having reached Monday morning, tired, pissed off, worried, and reeling from far too much sugar over the weekend, I then had to contend with the delightful prospect of missing my writing target also.  

As I strolled around the park (a slow walk is all I can do while we wait for the Prednisolone to work according to Doctor Karen – yes, that’s her name) I racked my brain for ideas. Something, anything. Just a thousand words on the state of the world. How hard could that be? 

Finally I decided, halfheartedly to work on a piece about how the political left and right have swapped places in the last ten years. This is an important article that I’ve had in my mind for a long time and may even try to develop into a book one day. It deserves my full attention, and I was not sure I would be able to do it justice in my current state. What a gyp. I can’t exercise, I can’t sleep, I can’t even sit still and write. 

I walked along feeling all pissed off and hearing the old, whispered siren call of the anxious mind. How easy would it be to take the rest of the day off and get stuck into a bottle of gin?  

Then a fellow approached me on a bicycle. He was a rotund Indian-looking chap with a bushy salt and pepper beard. As he passed, he met my eyes and gave me a broad, friendly smile. 

Something miraculous happened. A burst of positive emotion surged through me. My heart rate kicked up a few notches and I too broke into a smile. I stopped and looked after him, still feeling that wonderful uplifting wave.  

I call it a miracle – but it is a well-establish neurological phenomenon. Like laughter, hugs, and soft furry animals, a smile has powerful psychological effects. There is something though about the random smile from a stranger that is extra potent. I’ve experienced it before, and every time, it has the same effect. It hits you right under your rib-cage, like a jolt of electricity and swells up through your throat and reverberates around your brain, making colours more vivid and smells more distinct. Put simply – it gets you high.  

Immediately I knew what this week’s article would be about. And then and there, my day got just that little bit better. I had a plan and a renewed sense of purpose. One might even go so far as to say that this little smile was the small intervention of an angel – if you believe in such things.  

Whether you attribute it to a completely random coincidence, or something more mystical, it does make one consider the immense power we all wield in this basic facial expression, and it raises the question – why don’t we use it more often? 

I doubt the guy who smiled at me has any inkling of the impact he had on my day, which itself has also positively impacted the day of my girlfriend, as I’ve been more upbeat and less prone to the antisocial effects of my Prednisolone malaise. I expect he was probably just feeling good about the world and letting it shine out of him. Or perhaps, further up the road before he passed me, someone smiled at him. 

The butterfly effect is very real. Indeed, as I headed home to get some lunch and start writing this article, I passed that smile on to a couple of other people. I wonder how far around the world it has gone by now? 

Considering this wonderful aspect of our shared humanity I was lifted even further out of my funk, and I transcended my niggling concerns. For many years I’ve marvelled at the power of a single smile. It’s nice from friends and colleagues, but when you get one from a stranger, it’s pure magic. 

In our fraught urban world, it has become the norm to avoid eye contact and stay safely behind the ramparts of our smartphones. How much of our socio-cultural angst is down to this one factor? My bet is – a lot.  

It suits our ruling power structures to keep us atomised and mistrustful of one another. The left-right political paradigm is a great example. But so too are the past 24 months of Covid hysteria, lockdowns, masks, and social distancing. I mean, hell, for two years it’s actually been physically impossible to tell if a stranger was smiling at you or not. In my more conspiratorial moments, I believe that this was deliberate, and part of an ongoing agenda, and that our ultimate enslavement as a species will find its genesis in the moment we stop having meaningful human interactions with one another. 

And as Mark Zuckerberg marches us toward the pearly gates of the Metaverse, we need to ask ourselves what kind of future we want. Because what is it that keeps us alive? What is it that keeps us human? 

It is of course other humans. But it’s more specific than this – it is the acknowledgement of our own humanity by other humans. 

They guy on the bike today gave me the simplest and purest gift a person can give. In his smile he acknowledged my humanity. It lifted me up and inspired me. It broke the insular circuit of dread that I had created in my over-stimulated brain. It allowed me to step outside my head for a few seconds and reset by enjoying the simple and ancient gift of another human’s affirmation. 

You probably know what I’m talking about, I expect it’s happened to you a time or two before. The really wonderful thing is – we can create as much of this magic as we want. And you know what feels even better? 

When you smile at a stranger, and they smile back.  

Give it a go next time you’re out and about. I’m not saying go around grinning at everyone – that would be creepy. But be open to eye contact, that’s all. The secret magic of the universe (what some might call God) will do the rest. 

It won’t happen every time. In fact, often people will dart their eyes away fearfully, so conditioned have we become to this fractured, anxious world of ours. I myself have to consciously practice this behaviour because my natural instinct also is to avert my eyes. How sad is that? 

But after moments like today’s, it comes a little more naturally. I went out for another walk just before (many short walks, as opposed to one long one, says Dr Karen) and I kept my head up and made eye contact. No smiles quite materialised this time – but I exchanged some positive energy with at least three people.  

Don’t ask me how I know it was positive – we just know these things. The little flash in the iris, the minute upturn at the corners of the mouth, the slightest inclination of the chin.  

Contact. Acknowledgement. Humanity. 

I began the day feeling put-upon by the universe; rendered defunct by a convergence of unfair circumstances. Sometimes the universe just picks on us like this, it’s life. But it can single us out in other ways too. 

A few years ago, I was going through a rough patch and my girlfriend bought me a little print that read: Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day. 

I’m reminded of this today as thank the universe for that random smile – the most fundamental of human expressions – without which my day may well have ended as it began, and these thoughts, whatever they’re worth, may never have been committed to writing.  

1. To my great relief, I have now located the source of the hum. It appears to be coming from the apartment below us. I was able to isolate it by going to the mains power room in the basement of our complex and switching off the electricity to our neighbour’s place then bolting back upstairs to check if the noise was still present. Even better, having switched the power back on, the hum has not resumed. Whether or not my newfound peace will be permanent remains to be seen. But at least if it does resume, I’ll know I’m not losing my mind and there will be one less internet rabbit hole for me to go down.