Laughing in the Face of Adversity

My Aunt Helen has a gift. Her voice is sunshine. And then she laughs--a deep belly laugh. The kind you cannot fake. The kind that makes you laugh right along. That picks up your spirits right then and there. Cranky types might call her a Pollyanna when she exclaims her pleasure in the most mundane aspects of life--blue skies, a bubble bath, a delicious cooky made by a neighbor. These are the things that those of us in a rush or a rut sometimes fail to appreciate. Now in her mid-90s, Aunt Helen is still looking on the bright side. Like those gag gift birds that bob up no matter how many times they are pushed down into the glass of water, she comes right back.

I got to thinking about Aunt Helen's iconic laugh after a recent meditation experience focused on sound. The leader told us, "Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Trust your ears." He played some music on a stringed instrument and then on a flute. He chimed a brass bowl. All very chill. Then there were the people outside in the hallway talking in their "outside voices." Someone coughed. The person next to me was doing noisy yoga breaths. After about ten minutes the leader invited us to comment on the experience. As you might expect, there were many different viewpoints about what meditation is supposed to be, some of them ardently held. We commented on how the various sounds affected us. There was almost universal annoyance at those chatty people outside. Skilled Leader observed that annoying things come up in life. He asked us to think about how we respond to them. I realized that sometimes I can actually laugh at them.

That led me to wonder what would it be like to throw a few laughs into the sound mix for the meditation? Maybe one like Aunt Helen's. Or the infectious kind of laugh that bubbles out of happy toddlers. I think I know what would happen. Some people would be annoyed by one laugh or another, others would be unable to suppress their own laughs in response (which would probably really get to the already annoyed). I think I might be in the latter group.

In my family there are different opinions about laughter. There is the camp that thinks Life is Too Serious to be Laughing all the time. That laughing is just a way of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or overlooking the harsh realities. The other camp thinks Life is Too Serious NOT to be Laughing all the time. They seldom find common ground.

I have been accused of Laughing in the Face of Adversity. This crime, both at the felony and the misdemeanor levels, is also known as not taking something as seriously as someone else wants me to, or just having a more light-hearted take on a situation. Sometimes when this happens I admit I am probably on the verge of hysteria. Like the time my family and I got off a train only to realize that it was not the station where we had parked our car outside Paris. Uh-oh.

Given the two Laughter Camps in the family, some of us thought it was a bigger Uh-oh than others. Our problem-solving assets included the shards of a 65 year old father's high school French, a 13 year old first-year French student (who bore up very well as the family's language lifeline on this trip), and my own spatial/map-reading skills. But these did not kick into gear until I had laughed to the point of tears. It just seemed terribly funny, like a bad movie about clueless Americans in France on vacation, which I suppose we were.Once I got that out of my system, I was able to help figure out where we were and what station we needed to get to. The would-be French speakers had come to the same conclusion going about it in a different way. Moments later we boarded another train. At the next station we found our car and went on our way. To this day when I put myself back on that platform, I start to laugh. And to this day, others who were present remind me We Could Have Been LOST in a Foreign Country.

Okay, I get that not everything is funny. When my mood is sour or I am feeling anxious, it's hard to dig down for a laugh. And yet, laughter sustains me. It can make very minor adversity--a grey day Vermont, for example--much more tolerable. It can help me not take myself so seriously. The late Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, laughed in the face of serious adversity. His kidneys were failing and he refused dialysis. He watched funny movies and told jokes, spent months in hospice, then left, went back to his columns, and wrote another book. His kidneys finally got him, but not before he had the last laugh.

I hope if I ever have to face the kind of adversity Buchwald faced that I will be able to laugh. It would definitely qualify as felony level Laughing in the Face of Adversity. In the meantime, I intend to keep practicing at the misdemeanor level just to stay in shape. Aunt Helen would like that.