by Carol Dunn

Created on: July 08, 2010

Would a humorous approach to life make a difference?    “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry alone,” (Ella Wheeler).  Humor makes all the difference in life.  None of us has the power to control our lives or our circumstances.  The only thing we truly have power over is our reaction to those circumstances.  We can collapse on the floor like a sodden mess at a loved one’s funeral.  Or we can reflect on the joyful times we shared with our loved one and admit, “He lived a good life.”  Neither reaction changes the fact that our loved one is gone.  But our reaction changes the way it affects us for the rest of our life.

Kids naturally know it’s good to laugh.  According to WellSphere, they laugh about 100 times a day more than adults.  Of course, they don’t have car payments or mortgage payments, and they don’t have to fix the garbage disposal when it gets clogged up.  But kids really do have things figured out.  When a little kid pours a pitcher of cranberry juice on the white carpet, they think it’s awesome.  They are as proud as a cat that leaves a dead bird on the front porch.  They are a little perplexed about why mom is having a conniption fit about it.  The red spot looks really neat on that dull, white carpet – kind of like art on the floor. 

Kids will laugh about the most idiotic things – the more idiotic the better.  And then again, they’ll laugh at nothing at all.  Sometimes a kid will laugh so hard while eating cereal that milk comes out his nose.  Surely we’ve all had that friend that could make us crack up when we least expected, and on rare occasions cause us to pee our pants.  And that made the whole thing even funnier.  There are far fewer kids in psychoanalysis than adults – and the sad fact is, it’s usually an adult’s fault that a kid has stress anyway.  We could all benefit from looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

As adults, we worry about the past, which is past.  We worry about things in the future which may or may not (usually not) happen.  We waste too much time stressing about things we cannot change, when we could be eating ice cream or trying to ride a bicycle with our hands waving in the air.

There have been many studies about the healing qualities of laughter.  Laughter releases endorphins in the brain, which help us endure pain and also fortify the immune system.  Some people have even used a regimen of slapstick comedy movies as part of their cancer treatment. 

The way the world is churning right now – with social, economic and environmental ills – we all need a hefty dose of humor to make it through.  Whether we are laughing or crying, world events will continue on their path.  We need not let the circumstances pull us down.  It’s all in the way we look at it, or rather, laugh at it.

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