Laughter: A vital sense!

I wish to begin with a familiar scenario. Picture yourself back in your childhood, at any time period when you were between 5 to 15 years of age. What was the question you were most often asked by strangers and known people alike? Let me take a guess. Every time a nosy relative came by or a well-meaning family friend visited, they were curious to know what you wanted to become when you grew up. Based on the age of response, your answer probably ranged from imaginative to realistic. Depending on those answers, the elders would either praise your ambition or make fun of your imagination. Either ways, what was expected and accepted was an ambition worthy of prestige and fame in society, something which will give you a leap into the next league. However, irrespective of how high your goal or how far you have reached, there often remains a lingering question in most minds.

As we travel through this convoluted journey of life, we often stop to ponder upon what can make this journey worthwhile and meaningful. While doing so, our focus remains on the long term goal, or destination, that we have decided upon. This decision, and subsequently, the destination, keeps changing, based on our varied life experiences and learnings thereby. For some, it may be defined by external success with fame, fortune and family, while for others it may mean a sense of satisfaction from service and kindness. Irrespective of these, what most of us miss to see while traversing this path of life, is the experience of the path itself. Our day-to-day life and its various happenings, are where the actual journey occurs. Yet, this is the part we most neglect, as we are taught to focus on our long term goals and achievements. When I ask people (adults) what would make them most happy, the answers I get range from materialistic possessions to personal triumphs, all of which would be something they wish to find someday in the near or distant future. When I change this question slightly and ask them, when was the last time they were happy or laughed aloud at something, the answer would obviously change and some recent event or joke would instantly come to their mind. Even as they would recollect those, a smile would light up their faces for a few fleeting moments.

While saying this, I do not intend to pit one against the other. I do not wish to start a debate on the comparison of short term joy and long term happiness. One cannot and will not replace another. However, what I wish to bring to your notice is this. As you work towards lasting happiness, have you ever wondered on what you are missing out while striving for it?

Can this journey be simultaneously joyous as well as rewarding in itself, irrespective of the long term goals? The answer is a resounding YES.

Since childhood, we have been taught that happiness is something that one needs to work hard towards. One needs to buckle up, set aspirational goals that when achieved will supposedly leave a lasting sense of satisfaction and joy. While all of this is true, what has also been modelled to us often is that a sense of seriousness is required to achieve this. This sense of seriousness could be intended for the purpose of commitment or consistent effort. However, very often, this gets interpreted as an utmost seriousness for life itself, without the ability to find humour and laughter within its daily occurences. Have you ever wondered how boring life would be if we didn’t know how to bring laughter into it? Thankfully, we all have those friends or family members who are blessed with an amazing sense of humour, who can crack jokes and diffuse the tension in any situation. These people are often considered fun to be with and make social gatherings a blast. They are the ones everybody wants to meet and mingle with at an event. They automatically develop a good network of friends. Above all, they are people who are jolly good at life. Yet, we fail to recognise the hidden power such people have. You will find that such people have the ability to laugh first at themselves. They don’t take themselves too seriously and can even crack jokes on themselves.

Then there are another category of people. The below quote defines them brilliantly.

‘A person without a sense of humour is like a wagon without springs. It is jolted by every pebble on the road’

– Henry Ward Beecher.

I am sure many of you would have a few names or faces popping up in your mind as you read these words. Just like a wagon keeps stumbling through every obstacle or pebble on the road, such people tend to struggle with every event or person they come across that doesn’t suit their ideas. They find it difficult to reconcile with others ideas’ and personalities, often making it a contest of superiority and victory for self. This tends to happen because such people take themselves and life too seriously.

A sense of humour is crucial to every person’s life journey. Scientifically, a lot of research has been done on the importance of humour and laughter for the human body and mind. Humour has been found to increase one’s immune response, reduce allergic reactions and so on. In fact, a study on a group of healthy older adults has found that indulging in laughter after eating can lower blood glucose levels. In addition to all these scientifically proven physiological effects, a sense of humour plays wonders for the psychology too. It has been shown to be effective in decreasing stress and anxiety, increasing optimism and a perception of self-control. While many of us may be aware of these benefits and have experienced them as well in our lives, we struggle to find humour when we need it the most. A routine conversation at workplace or family is often sufficient to trigger a serious reaction in our minds about it, making it a big occurrence for us.

Let us pause for a moment and think about this. Try and recollect a recent small incident at home or work where something didn’t set well with you and got you all riled up in a short span of time. Now that a certain amount of time may have passed since then, can you now look back at it and see some humour in it? More often than not, if you pay close attention, there is something funny in a lot of incidents. This happened with me recently. As someone on this continuous journey of self-awareness, having worked with my emotions and inner self since more than a decade now, I have become aware of a few trigger points for myself. While in a casual conversation with my husband, he made a few remarks which didn’t sit well with me. I immediately got offended, snapped back at him and was ready to get into an argument. Just then, a small voice in my brain popped up and said, “there you go down the mud slide again!” The imagery of it and the abruptness of the voice instantly calmed me down and I let my anger go. During such tense moments, it is obviously inappropriate to use humour at the opposite person. Yet, there will definitely be some element of yours that you could convert into humour. If not for that voice, I would have gotten into a bigger argument and a nasty exchange of words all over again. It is the self-awareness work of the past decade and the learnt behaviour of being okay with looking at my faults that helped the little voice to pop up and helped me save a few calories that would otherwise be wasted in fuming!

The self-awareness journey is crucial to help us develop a sense of humour that may have gone missing within us. This is because self-awareness teaches us that we have many flaws too, like every person we choose to find fault with. As we learn to become okay with others despite their flaws, we also learn to accept ourselves as we are. Just as self-awareness helps develop our sense of humour, the latter in turn makes the journey of self-awareness a lot more easier. When we learn to laugh at ourselves, our flaws become that much more palatable to us.

A spiritual leader I have read of would often state that seriousness is a disease that plagues mankind. Like the old saying goes, ‘Don’t take life too seriously. You are not getting out of it alive!’ It is only fair to close this not-so-serious conversation on humour with a joke.

Nasruddin’s donkey was lost, but Nasruddin appeared to be happy, not sad. Instead of looking for his donkey, he sat drinking coffee in the coffeehouse.

Everyone was puzzled about this, knowing how much Nasruddin loved his donkey, and his donkey had now been missing for several days.

“I don’t understand why you look so happy,” someone finally said to him. “How can you smile like that when your donkey is lost?”

“I’m smiling because I’m not on the donkey,” explained Nasruddin, taking another sip of his coffee. “Just imagine: if I were on the donkey, I would be lost too!”