Laughter

Lately my moods have been all over the place ... a fact that doesn't cause too much concern, actually. I figure that I'm still on the right track as long as I feel something other than that drained, depressive feeling that ebbs and flows.

Yesterday started with a sob-fest, after hearing a sad song that brought back memories, and ended with me laughing at a DVD of Bridesmaids. I always go for the Serious movies. Then, red-eyed and sniffling afterwards, I swear that next time I'll watch a comedy instead. This time was finally that next time. Bridesmaids was the prescription two friends gave me this week.

In the years they've been married, they've been through more than anyone else I know: major losses (different from mine), alcoholism, homelessness … then hard-won sobriety, followed by bad luck and—while doing everything right—more homelessness for months on end. I've seen them feeling very down at times, naturally.

But they can also LAUGH—also more than anyone else I know. When they're together, it's clear that their humor is a habit; they tease each other back and forth over little things like a couple of high-school friends. At the opposite end of the spectrum, nothing is too big and awful to have something funny hidden in it somewhere. I think their ability to just let go and laugh sometimes (OK, often) is a big part of what's helped them to keep going.

Another friend just returned from visiting loved ones in Cuba. In an email, she wrote, "The trip was magical, as is life when we allow it to be. In Cuba, there is no other way ... By necessity, people live in the moment and work with accepting and going beyond external circumstances with humor and love."

I'll be honest: I'm not great at the humor thing. It's the first ability to disappear when I'm feeling anything less than good. Not only does it feel like a stretch—at a time when I most want to contract and curl up, protecting my soft spots from further injury—but it feels almost morally wrong. Like laughing at a situation means accepting it.

And yet … that IS sort of what it means, isn't it? That’s exactly WHY it's so healing when I let myself let go.

Accepting something doesn't mean condoning it, just recognizing that yes, this is what is real. How can I ever hope to reach the Point B I'm so fixated on (or anywhere else I might want to end up), without first getting familiar with the landscape around Point A? I also have to acknowledge the scary fact that many important things will always be out of my control.

This week, in a context totally different from the one here, I heard one person give another this advice: "Keep telling your story. Just keep telling it, until the horror fades." It's true. The more I tell my story, the more the visceral horror fades, and along with it, the sense of dislocation ("This CAN'T be my real life!?") and being stuck at a dead end. It's possible to uncurl, stretch out a little, look around. It's even possible to laugh—not to cover the grief, but to keep the fear in my mind from shutting down my heart.

According to this article:

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic ... Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that's pretty extraordinary.

When we're able to do it sincerely, from the heart, laughing in the face of disaster can be acceptance and uprising all at once (see Tig Notaro). It's immensely courageous.

I need more of it in my life.