Sometimes, reflections about life can stem from a place you wouldn't expect. For me, it was a throwaway quote from a stern Englishwoman. I can just see the scene now: Mary Poppins, after nonchalantly ascending a staircase by floating up its railing, greets the Banks children—their mouths agape—with a playful quip, "Close your mouth please, Michael, we are not a codfish."
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Same, Michael. Same.
Dropping your jaw is usually instinctual, an involuntary reaction to something shocking. Whether that shock is a result of something unbelievably beautiful or devastatingly horrific is another story. Nevertheless, the act itself of allowing my lower lip to unhinge from my upper has become a bit more commonplace than usual lately and I'm sorting out exactly why that is.
I'll admit that catching flies once held very little interest for me. As someone who thrives off of always having a plan, surprise can frighten me to a fault. That being said, there's also something refreshing about the unexpected. Allowing yourself to feel pure awe and amazement, feeling your breath escape from your mouth in a huff, stolen by an extraordinary moment. Dropping your jaw can come from an instance as simple as hearing a swell in your favorite song. It can capture more complicated feelings of wonder and marvel, like those experienced when stepping onto a New York City street for the first time or catching a glimpse of Cinderella Castle on your way down Main Street U.S.A. A jaw-drop can come from the sudden impact of a particularly good comeback, or a plot twist on 'Game of Thrones,' or the sight of a friend you haven't seen in a while or the discovery of a cute dog walking right in your path. In any of these cases, dropping your jaw is a welcome reaction to sudden change.
However, there are also times when the jaw-drop is in response to some unwelcome change. For instance, I know how I feel whenever I wake up to a news alert describing the latest in a long slew of tragedies. I know how I feel when I hear about yet another person or group being murdered because of the color of their skin, because of the uniform that they wear, because of who they love or because their slaughter was simply deemed necessary by the path of a bullet. Moments like those are when dropping your jaw is less of an expression of amazement and more one of fear, indignation and anguish. Hearing these stories of sickening violence and death makes me wonder just how many jaws have dropped in response to them and the thought of that scale is not comforting.
My hope is that our jaws will continue to drop, not because there is an overload of unrest in this world but because someday we find our way back to believing in the unexpected. The next time you have to pick your open mouth up off the floor, I sincerely hope that it's the result of an event so wonderful that you just can't control your face, like Michael Banks witnessing his new gravity-defying nanny. And if a wonderful moment turns out not to be the case, then I hope that whatever tragedy causes our jaws to drop next is the one that finally results in some much-needed change, at the very least for the sake of our mandible.
