I won’t tell you to smile.

I’d say I’m a pretty big smiler. Especially for the New York standard. I often smile at strangers — although much less than when I first moved to the city. I moved to New York from Sri Lanka when I was 18. Sri Lankans are some of the warmest, friendliest humans on the planet. Living there you quickly get accustomed to the smiling culture in conjunction with nodding your head from side to side (not to be mistaken for front to back). This very smiley Sri Lankan head-bob can be a ‘yes’ one day, a ‘no’ the next, and sometimes a ‘maybe’. The mystery is what keeps it exciting. I soon adjusted to the culture of New York, realizing that smiling can often be taken as an “ok” to unwanted advances which pushed me to tone down a bit. Nevertheless, my Sri Lankan roots, New Yorker or not, remained within me.

We are social creatures. We communicate with so many visual cues every single day. Even in a city like New York, with our busy reputations and no time to smell the flowers, we too, have a system of communicating with each other through a slew of non-verbal cues. The most prized being, the smile. We have used these cues for a millennia to understand each other, communicate, negotiate, and find common ground. With the necessary rise of the face mask during the COVID 19 pandemic, we have now lost the focal point of non-verbal communication and added a layer of distance between us at a time where we need connection more than ever.

Getty Images.