500 Words a Week - Find a Reason to Laugh
“Seriousness saddles the work with a burden. It misses the playful side of being human. The chaotic exuberance of being present in the world. The lightness of pure enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake.”
- Rick Rubin
At times I think we have lost the simple skill to seek enjoyment from life. We get so worried and anxious about our career paths, or what we are doing with our life, we have forgotten how to enjoy what we are going through.
When was the last time you did something purely for the sake of doing it, for the sake of unadulterated enjoyment. No ulterior motives. No secondary health benefits you are trying to achieve. No secondary attempts of “networking” on golf trips. Just doing something for the sake of attempting to bring some joy into your life. To bring an element of lightness.
I think in all our seriousness about ourselves, we have forgotten how to have fun. We have forgotten how to laugh at our clumsiness at spilling a drink, and we rush to anger and frustration. When was the last time you experienced one of those wondrous laughing fits? The ones when you find yourself on the verge of tears, gasping for breath in between rasps of laughter. Can we look to reclaim some of these moments? Can we look to reclaim our childlike ability to seek play, to find wonder and merriment in the smallest and obscure details.
When you give a child a cardboard box, it becomes a house, it becomes a castle to protect, it becomes a robot costume. When we look at a cardboard box, we see a slightly annoying task in front of us of tearing it down and placing it in the recycling bin. Can we retrieve some of this aforementioned sense of wonder?
Think of how much we reduce the life we experience by constantly being burdened with seriousness.
Not only does embracing fun and play aid with our life experience, it helps with our career. We become more creative, more imaginative, we see there are many possibilities. It makes us more inquisitive and engaged. It’s an antidote to stress, which is the enemy of being productive as it shuts down all the creative parts of our brain.
Smile broadly, laugh deeply, stop taking yourself so seriously. Reminisce with an old friend about the wonderfully hilarious mistakes of your youth, the embarrassing moments of school that at the time seemed like the world's biggest problems and now provide us with a moment of laughter. Seek out the little pockets of joy in day to day life that only appear when you start looking for them. Life is already difficult enough without us adding more hardship to it.
