It has come to my attention that my face is talking behind my back.

When I write, my face makes all the expressions of the words in my head, as if I am speaking them. Sometimes I feel this happening, but I hadn’t realized it was noticeable until my teenager pointed it out. Teenagers notice things and then share what they find fascinating. Like what your face is doing when you are lost in thought, for instance.

Unfortunately, odds are good that this is happening all the time. I write for work, I write for play, and I write for my mental health. I write reminder notes and grocery lists. I am writing right now. Before I sat down to write I made coffee and tried some of these words on in my head to see how they sounded together. In other words, I was writing while I made the coffee.

I have thought about setting up a video camera and training it on my face to capture what is happening, but that way madness lies. That’s probably what happened to Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger, and Richard Simmons. I suspect I have Guitar Solo face when I write, but I’d prefer not to have that confirmed. Rowan Atkinson had the same problem:

The only thing to do is to write about puppies, and subjects that don’t make me ponder deeply. I have an uncanny ability to ponder deeply about things – like why no one has ever called their band Desmond’s Tutu, or what should go on my hospitality rider when I start that band.

To be clear, I am not an open book. I am really good at stuffing my emotional response out of sight in actual conversations. But if I am having a conversation in my head in addition to the one we’re having? All bets are off. I need some kind of alert when I start sorting words in my head publicly. It would work like a posture corrector for my face.

Maybe that’s what meditation is about. Today I’m going to have one conversation at a time and Be Here Now. When I revisit arguments I never had in the first place, I will shift my focus and envision what it feels like to be a leaf in the spring. Today will be stunning and my face will not collapse from exhaustion promptly at 3 p.m.

I’ll let you know how it goes – but it will probably be obvious. It’s written all over my face.

(Illustration is from The expression of the emotions in man and animals, by Charles Darwin, 1872)