A Pocket Is No Place

Blues Traveler has a song called, "The Mountains Win Again." It's basically about somebody leaving somebody and that somebody being hurt by it, but I'm sure there's a whole lot more in that story than the lines tell in black and white. There almost always is more to a story.

But there's this line in there, "A pocket is no place for a smile anyway."

I think that's right. A pocket isn't a very good place for a smile. A smile is what your mouth does, and that's best left right there on the front of your face. But, aside from the physical humor, what I think the line gets at (and really the rest of the song) is that we are most human when we experience feelings. And those aren't to be concealed in your pocket or behind so many of the other walls we put up. Rather, we should let our feelings be felt, experienced, and even shared. When we hide our feelings, we hiding a significant piece of ourselves. It puts up a wall. It separates us from those relationships around us.

Maybe that's one of the things so many people love about babies. Their innocence in self-expression. They laugh. They cry. They wear it all out there for anybody else to see. I don't think it's so much a self-centeredness as it is an all out honesty of how they feel. Now, there's a part of maturity that is learning how to express those feelings properly, but I don't think "properly" means learning not to express them.

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