there are some neat wordings in there, each tear in the river is singularly counted. I love that. It reminds of every blade of grass has its guardian angel, from the Talmud.
I believe in this universe every emotion is like a note in a sacred song, and God has a good enough ear to hear and savor every note, similar to how we can savor both major and minor scales, along with so many variants and modes of the two. And we have the ability t play the silences, the rests, just like a brilliant performer, or a great composer. John Cage, a respected composer, went as far as writing a piece called 4.33, which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, in front of a live audience. It’s dazzling, because you are forced to hear the room ambience, the breathing and coughs, etc. It is music, and our silence, too, is always music that we can hear without our own vocal chords getting in the way.
I have heard that Americans smile too much that it comes off as phony and sad to europeans, especially western europe and russia. Part of it is America, for all its flaws, is a really happy place. The whole economy is geared toward easily accessible, if not fleeting and shallow, happiness. We have a lot to actually smile about, at least when we’re not working.
Also, America enjoyed something of a love/hippie sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s, along with a lot of drugs, and ideologues proposed from everyone from timothy leary to kerouac to sonny and cher to jonny carson and everyone in between. This left an indelible stamp of a sense of love, camaraderie and openness on American social fabric. There is neurolinguistic programming that talks place when you use positive words, and neurophysical programming when you smile. This is proven. Smiling releases endorphins and improves your mood, in yourself and others. It is possible that the unfortunate political systems in places in Russia and western europe strayed from the smile in past centuries and had good reason to. A smile in Poland is indeed phony. A smile in the USA usually isn’t. It is, at worst, an effort to feel better, and make others feel better. There is nothing wrong with that.
A plastic manipulative smile is something else. Americans hate those. It’s usually pretty obvious because people aren’t smiling with their eyes.