Orinda Woman Sees Smiling Faces Everywhere

Ruth Kaiser had always seen a smiley face on a guardrail at the side of Lafayette’s Reliez Station Road. There were strips of tape, forming two eyes and a mouth, on a rusted square of metal.

As she drove by, she’d tried to point it out to others, but no one ever saw it. One day, she snapped a picture – and the Spontaneous Smiley Project developed.

Kaiser, a preschool director who lives in Orinda, started a Facebook page and then a website devoted to photo galleries of unexpectedly encountered smiley faces. They’re in a bowl of macaroni and cheese, a slice of French bread, the bottom of a garbage can.

“The philosophy is that you need to decide to notice the things in life that have potential to give you pleasure, and let them give you pleasure,” Kaiser said.

Since the project launched in 2008, Kaiser has also teamed up with Operation Smile to sponsor medical aid for those in need.

The next chapter is a children’s book, on shelves next March, with a simple message: You can choose to be happy by practicing positive emotions.

“It’s possible to change the life you have by making it a conscious exercise,” Kaiser said. “Life doesn’t just roll over you like a steam train you can’t stop. You get to decide what life is like, by defining it as good.”

And you can make that decision thousands of times each day, she said.

For Kaiser, that means using traffic jams to jam out to a favorite song, or staring at a sunset she noticed while walking back to her car. It means chit-chatting with strangers, or parking far away from the grocery store to open up spaces for those who really need them.

It means seeing smileys everywhere. Kaiser almost never leaves her house without her digital camera, chronicling nearly every grinning face she sees.

The smiles are contagious. People worldwide – from Angola to New Zealand – have joined Kaiser, and emailed her what they capture.

“I was born a glass-half-full kind of person,” she said. “But since the project started, over the last three years, I have had a blossoming of this feeling.”