If you have followed this blog for awhile you have seen photos of many bright smiles from Cindy. I have bountiful material from the American Discovery and Pacific Crest Trails from which to choose these smiles, yet you don’t get to see the “rejects.” I have photos where Cindy looks dazed, not in the present moment I assumed she would be when I took the photo. I also declined to take photos during the bad moments, when she was sad over not being to help or angry at the trail. Significantly, I also don’t have photos of “put on” smiles from Cindy during these journeys, because there were none. Her genuine smiles were either full of warmth, or she didn’t smile.
Pacific Crest Journey 2014
The television in our living room reveals the significance of this to me. Lately I’ve been hooking up my computer to the television via an HDMI cable. Sometimes I actively work on slides for the American Discovery project, with the added intent of reinforcing that journey in Cindy’s memories. Other times I use the computer’s screen saver for Cindy to watch slide shows of our family. Currently, I have the slides from our family’s Wonderland Trail hike in 2005 cycling through. Before that I featured our family’s Germany vacation in 2007.
Wonderland Trail 2005
There are photos from these trips of Cindy’s genuine smile; but there also are photos of an evidently “put on” smile for the camera. These confirm some of my suspicions as I put them to words in a series of eBooks I am beginning, with a working title of “Journeys with an Expedition Woman.” I point to the year 2005 as a time when Cindy was experiencing too much stress. I point to the year 2007 as a time when Cindy displayed an abnormal response of blocking out stressful family situations. The proofs are all in her smile.
None of us lead the perfect life where we are glowing smiles all the time. We experience sadness; we experience anger. These raw emotions come out, indeed, letting them come out in a proper way enable the glowing smiles to eventually come out as well; the yin and yang to our emotional health. Abundant evidence now shows that the danger to our health does not come so much from escaping “bad times” as from ongoing stress, the type of stress that forces a “put on” smile for the camera, the type of smile Cindy displays in some of our Wonderland and Germany photos.
Germany 2007
Obviously, I am not happy with how Cindy’s life is concluding, how our life together is concluding. I would restore her brain health. I would take away her occasional bouts with sadness and frustration. Yet I do take consolation nowadays in her smile, a smile that no longer is “put on” for the camera, a smile that reveals we at least have made progress with her quality of life.
