One Smile at a Time

The United States of America

The border agent let me pass through the gate.
I wasn't expecting a smile. My American friends had been freaking out lately over all those news stories about foreigners getting stuck at airports.

No, instead, the guy smiled at me. He asked where I would reside and why I was coming to the US. Finally, he wished me a good trip with a smile on his face.

The family smiled too. I was expecting this one.
It was like in a movie: people you see for the first time, picking you up at the airport with a big sign.
The best welcome you can expect when arriving in a new country. In a new home.

"How are you?"
At first I thought she was talking to someone else. But no. The cashier was asking me, flashing a big smile while I looked around in the shop.
This felt quite foreign to a Frenchman like me. Don't get me wrong, I consider myself polite, but French culture tends to be more protective of personal space.
Is it because our spaces are smaller?

It's true that over there everyone has more space. In the house, in the car, on the street, in the supermarket, in the restaurant, in the park, etc. Everything is bigger.
Cities are wide there. They extend over miles with tons of free space. Not useless though.
Home sweet home is sweet because it's a world separated by oceans of grass.
And like any ocean, this one teems with life: rabbits dart between yards, squirrels spiral up trees, fireflies blink in summer twilight. Raccoons. Deer and bucks. Armadillos. Alligators. Sometimes bears lumber through, or cougars pad silently across the endless green. Some even say Bigfoot lives there.

For long period of time, hundreds of years ago in the Western world, wilderness and unspoiled nature were not objects of veneration or wonder. They were blights upon the scenery. Mountains despoiled our vistas, and the untamed outdoors was a pox upon the earth.
Attempt to range your mind back toward this moment, where mountains were not the pinnacle— pardon the word choice-of the landscape but objects that ruined our views, described as "warts" or "boils." Humanity's goal was to avoid the wilderness, and our instinct was to recoil before it. To behold a mountain was not to be humbled, or to feel your heart leap, but to be mortified and disgusted.
This is almost impossible to imagine and entirely foreign to our modern view, where we enjoy nature, spend time in it, paint it, look at it, use our vacations to escape into it. But prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such was the case in Western society. There was a mortal fear of the natural state of the world.
So greatly did this part of humanity shrink from untamed nature that some travelers even asked to be blindfolded as they crossed the Alps, lest they get a glimpse of terrifying wilderness.
But beginning several centuries ago, writers began to write of the sublime, scientists examined mountainous regions, artists began to depict these outdoor scenes, and slowly our views changed.

That's why we should always choose the walk over the TV.
"The more you buy, the more you save," you can hear on the latter.
But after a walk, it's more like: "the more you discover, the more you smile."
And I smiled a lot. At least internally. The feeling of a genuine, childlike smile. Over the new landscapes, the new words, the new people, the new culture. The new rhythm and pace.

Smiling like this stretches time. Like when we were kids. Like when you enter the flow state while picking blueberries in a field for two hours. Like when you watch the sunset, perched on a small fishing dock, waiting for that seal to surface.
Being out of sync due to the time difference also helped. But the very rhythm of life moved differently there.
Dinner at five thirty made me grin. The day felt stretched - not rushed, just... expanded.

Like time itself had more room to breathe there.

That actually holds true for every summer. Wherever we are.

We only have eighty of them in a lifetime.
This one will be one of the best for me.
Because I discovered a new territory. I discovered a new home. New people. New stories.
It was my first time on the Pacific Ocean.
On the opposite side of the globe.
And there too, people smile.