Discover the truth found in your own smile

You can go through life determined to make everyone smile, determined to make everyone feel at peace, determined to make everyone like you. You can do that. But in the end, chances are you won't be smiling. You won't be at peace. Chances are, the one person you'll no longer be able to make like you is you.

If you spend your life obsessed with controlling the reactions on the faces around you, there comes a day when the one reaction you won't be able to control is on the face in the mirror.

If you spend your life as a chameleon, constantly changing colors to bring out the most beautiful colors in others, there comes a day when you no longer know your own true colors.

On that day, you will either quit - too exhausted to any longer manage anyone's reactions - too exhausted to even care - or, instead, you will turn to the truth.

Turn to the truth that no one can ever truly smile at you if they've never seen you. And suddenly, that truth will bother you more than any face without a smile.

On that day, you'll begin to search for the truth that lives in the smile you've overlooked the longest. Your own. On that day, you'll begin to heal yourself from the addiction of the world's smiles and begin investing in you own.

And one day, somewhere along the road of this journey, you'll discover something surprising. There are more smiles around you than you've ever seen.

This is a beautiful poem - Blessings on the Man, by George L. Perin:

Blessings on the man who smiles!
I do not mean the man who smiles for effect,
Nor the one who smiles when the world smiles,
I mean the man whose smile is born of an inner radiance,
The man who smiles when the clouds lower,
When fortune frowns, when the tides are adverse.
Such a man not only makes a new world for himself,
But he multiplies himself an hundred fold
in the strength and courage of other men.

You have no greater force in life than your inner radiance. Don't miss the truth of that force while you try to force outward radiance on others.

Find your own smile, as lost as it may be. Because when you find it, you will make a new world for yourself. And in that world, you will discover the true colors of a smile.

Nothing smiles bigger and brighter than the truth.