The Funny Side
Although I certainly do not feel like it at all times, I do make an effort to look at the funny side of life and to hang around with like-minded people. It brightens life.
Nobody wants to be around people who are always complaining about something or the other, no matter their age—or perhaps especially when they’re on the downhill side of 50. The longer we live, the more problems we face, but that doesn’t mean that everything is bad. There’s always a bit of sunshine even in a cloudy cycle.
A fun-loving woman I know tells her husband she keeps a spare man in the trunk of her car in case he goes flat.
Some people may see the cliché Laughter is the Best Medicine as being overused, but that does not make it less true. Medical research shows that laughter has an immediate positive effect on the main organs of the human body. It certainly relieves stress.
In my experience those who have mastered the art of laughing at life and its foibles have an easier time than people who focus all their energy on the less-than-perfect moments we all experience. One of the reasons is certainly that laughter relaxes the whole being. As Audrey Hepburn famously said: Laughing cures a multitude of ills.
There’s nothing funny about getting older, a colleague told me a while back. My answer was that she was right but also very wrong. Sure, many of us could do without the pain of arthritis, for example, but that doesn’t mean that it should be the center of our lives. We live in an epoch which offers a plethora of remedies for a variety of health problems, something that was not available to our ancestors. It frees us to make the most of life and make it as pleasant as possible.
Accepting what is and making the best of it is not always easy. Some people constantly stand on their tippy toes to see over the fence in the neighbor’s yard to prove that the grass there is indeed greener, that other people can laugh while they can’t. I have always found it interesting that we are all inclined to compare ourselves to others, in one way or another. The neighbor is prettier, richer, happier, and so on, we think. What we tend to forget is that we are all different, and that appearances can be quite deceiving.
I believe that to be happy, we have to dwell on the good things in our lives at the present moment, and laugh at the rest. We may have arthritic knees, but it does not prevent us from enjoying our grandchildren. And we can all use humor to diffuse the irritations of life. People don’t stop laughing because they grow old, they grow old because they stop laughing. And besides, laughter is contagious.
Share a joke with your spouse, your neighbor or your friend and the day is bound to be brighter.
