Taught by Example

This article was published in Storytime Tapestry and gather.com

Warm smiles, infectious laughter and love will change the very essence of me. It will change my outlook and my attitude towards life and all that it encompasses.

I do not find myself as a person who laughs quite as much as I should. I was always a very serious person and for me that is a positive, a good part of me, but yet I feel I have missed out by not laughing as much as I could. It is hard for me to take life less than seriously. It is like something inside of me says, "Carol, you have one life to live if you don't take it seriously who else will?" Even though that statement holds true, it also is very limiting. I believe in balance, I believe in the yin and yang, and universal harmony, but I failed to see a simple truth; there is no life without laughter. When we deny laughter, we become robots, simply going through the basics of existing, never having truly lived life to the fullest. I love to be serious. I must also learn to laugh as well.

I don't want you to think I have never laughed in my life, gosh that would be surreal. But I haven't laughed enough is the message I want to get across. Equally important to note is that when I have laughed, I failed to see the connection laughter brings to healing, loving, and reaching out to other human beings.

When I look back at some snippets of my life I see where I have missed golden opportunities to reflect upon the healing power of laughter. One situation I can remember vividly was after the birth of my son. I was twenty-one years old, I just had a caesarian section and I was in pain. I had never felt pain before in my young life. The shock of this first operation for me was the worst. I sat in my hospital bed wishing I was dead. I didn't want to move for fear I would cause myself even more pain. I laid there like dead wood until I was forced to move by a nurse and under duress at that! I was miserable. I wanted to go home; I wanted the pain to just stop.