I met with an old friend recently. He’s a photographer. He WAS a photojournalist, but now, with a sad smile, he describes himself as a hobbyist. He’s been through some tough times, photographing wars in the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, Sudan... He’d been shot at, and missed. Except once, when a mortar shell landed behind him. It killed one, maimed two, plus him. (I didn’t tell him I was going to write about him — heck, I didn’t KNOW I was going to write about him until the words started spilling across the screen! — that’s why I’m not using his name. We’ll just call him ‘my friend’, okay?) I found him at the hospital where he was evacuated for care. As he was taken on a stretcher from the helicopter that brought him in, he joked that he looked like a VCR with all the cables and tubes poked into him. He was mostly whole, minus the spleen, but with the addition of two fist-sized holes in his back. See, the shrapnel went into his back through the flack-jacket (bulletproof vest) he was wearing, entered under one kidney barely grazing it (lucky!), through the spleen, around the inside of the spine where it only chipped a vertebra and nerves (again: lucky!), and out under the other kidney without touching it. Did I mention he was lucky?
When he learned to walk again, he once confided in me his fears of not being able to go back to the war zone. But, for my friend, everything in life can be solved by the strength of one’s will. And so, when he felt physically recovered enough, he made himself join the media crew headed for the front line. In his quest to conquer his fear, he overdid it, going from one front line to the other, from one crisis to the next, from one war to another. But, that will be a story for another time.
I brought my friend up because of a smile. That’s what I was going to tell you about when I got sidetracked — or side-sucked — into his background story and my memories. If you ask him directly, he’ll tell you he never suffered from PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome); his nightmares are just bad dreams; his outbursts of anger are just his lack of patience with idiots; his empty gaze and darkest thoughts are not depression, they are meditations on the past and future. And he never had suicidal thoughts, he just has periods when he tests his limits, like driving recklessly fast on a narrow winding road, or choosing the most dangerous assignments, or diving too deep, swimming too far, hiking alone in wilderness for days...
“We all got our own funny moods”, as Simply Red would put it, and on some mornings my friend wakes up with a dark, stormy cloud raging in his head. Some days he doesn’t realize where the storm is heading, and those are dark days. But most days he’s bothered by the darkness in him. Then he looks at his dog, who looks right back at him. Usually the dog does something cute — whimpers, barks, wags his tail or just cocks his head. Or maybe he does nothing at all, but the sight of him is still enough to make my friend consciously force a smile on his face. As he describes it, the first of those smiles is always rough, edgy, forced. More a snarl than a smile, he says. Even so, it loosens something in him. The next smile is already more natural and by the third a small bit of his darkness has lifted.
Smile, he tells me, is a miracle cure. No matter the shit-storm you’re in, when you stretch those lips, your brain — the fool it is — thinks ‘yay, we’re having fun’ and it releases endorphins into the old meatsack of your body. The next thing you know, you are REALLY feeling better. Then you smile for real! Good ol’ Charlie Chaplin had it all figured out all those years ago, when he wrote ‘Smile’.
I realized my friend is onto something during my marathon days. Those 42.4 kms (or 26.2 miles, if you will) put me through various stages, from giddy excitement at the start, through happiness of the first half when I’d hug the whole world if I could, to absolute misery after the 35th kilometre. It’s in those past-35 kms parts that I remember my friend and force a smile on my face. And always — ALWAYS — the miracle truly happens: I start feeling lighter on my tired feet, my thoughts brighten up and, a bonus — when people see me smile, they smile back. The spectators raise the level of their noise, complete strangers cheer me on. I’m not imagining it — smiling is a ‘thing’ with distance runners!
But, you don’t need to put yourself through a marathon race (or training) to feel the healing energy of a simple smile. Next time when you realize you’re feeling blue, try it. Smile. And again. And again.
”That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just...
...smile”