Chapter 26: Age Before Beauty

Dear reader,

One of the five most important women in my life is my grandma. She is not only the last grandparent that I and the rest of my cousins have, she is our role model. Just over two weeks ago she came from the Philippines to stay with my family. The day was wonderful for all of us. For me it has been a good number of years since I have been in contact with her and yet she looks and acts the same. This had led me to describe her as a truly timeless women and the respect and admiration that I hold towards her had to transpose itself into today's blog post.

I gladly then, write to you all today on the importance of respecting not just the elderly but those who are of key note importance in your family. I want you to come away from today's post with the understanding of the lessons that one can learn from them, and the wisdom that you can gain by  spending more time with them.

Chapter 25: All in the Smile

Dear reader,

Long time, no see. Please, take a seat. :)

It is all in the smile. Imagine for me two strangers in a foreign land who speak different languages. They cross each other in a busy market square between the isles of exotic food and for a moment they catch eyes with one another. The man breathes out to hide his belly, the woman leans forward to bring out her chest. There is a connection. She smiles at him and he smiles back and yet, they move on perhaps never to meet again.

The smile to me is a universal truth. It speaks over language barriers, over gender and context. A simple twitch in the face has never meant nor changed so much. It makes an average dancer look great, a politician look competent, a woman more beautiful and a baby irresistible.

My papa once told me that in some places people are taught how to smile. It made me laugh at the time to hear that this was the case in some major corporations. That some employees simply looked too serious. It reminds me of some of my experiences with people who have no time to smile in fear of not getting the job done. Interestingly most people choose not to smile because work, rather like school, appears to be a serious and hard ordeal. Yet we never to stop ask ourselves how much easier it would be if we took it a little less seriously and instead of grumbling about work, make it an enjoyable activity by laughing at ourselves: by smiling a little more.