While writing my last post about how Buddhist metta meditation can help you to develop an open-hearted stance, I realized how bizarrely Pollyannaish that idea must appear to the uninitiated. These days, mainstream culture pushes us to adopt a “cool” stance: don’t smile or say hello, never look enthusiastic, tune out with your iPod/Blackberry/cell phone as much as you can, and generally try to look as though you’re much more important and sought-after than the next person. In contrast, the idea of going about zapping passersby with little “May you be happy!” thought bubbles is SO not this millennium.

Too bad for us! What you can miss out on by adopting the coolness stance was apparent to me on a recent bus ride, when a young mother boarded the bus with her pre-toddler son.

As the bus pulled away from their stop, the baby crawled from his mother’s lap onto the window seat just in front of me. Chortling and cooing, he pulled himself up to standing so that he could look out the bus window. Just below us—what a fabulous development!—he saw that an SUV had begun to slowly overtake our bus. It inched along below the watching baby, who whooped and belly-laughed with delight as he observed this fascinating motion.

Next, the baby’s gaze shifted to a line of trees along the far side of the road. From our perspective, those trees were zipping northward at a tremendous rate. The baby was enthusiastic about this behavior as well. Laughing hard, he lifted himself onto his toes, then bounced up and down with enthusiasm as he watched the trees fly past.

How wonderful to be thus gladdened by events so ordinary that they normally are utterly beneath our notice! The baby needed no metta thought bubbles from me. He already was the soul of gleeful open heartedness—and the antithesis of coolness. How sad for us that somehow, little by little, we lose this happy way of being that we’re all born into.

May the baby be safe and protected. May he keep his glad heart, and never trade it for “coolness.”