Laugh Away Your Anger

Does anyone remember laughter? -- Robert Plant

Sometimes I laugh at the most inconvenient times. Sometimes I laugh at the most inappropriate things. Sometimes I laugh so I don’t cry. Sometimes the thing I am laughing about will cause my wife to furl her brow at me, as stern a warning needed for me to turn off my internal laugh track. But I also know a secret about her, she can't laugh at the things I say when we run together. She has to stop and tell me "Don't make me laugh." Then she gets a little mad because she stopped running because of me.

The thing that I have noticed is that when I laugh, I do not feel angry. The two are mutually exclusive to each other. Like pouring water on a campfire, laughter extinguishes the flames of angry immediately. With a hiss, all the meanness of your thoughts turn to white smoke and steam.

I have also noticed that laughter—genuine laughter—can quiet shouting voices in a room. Other people upset with you tend to be rendered speechless by a face cackling with laughter. Truly speechless. I have witnessed the jaws go slack and the bile of their words literally dry their throats so they can't make any noise.

Being a storyteller myself (or shameless exaggerator according to the wife), I love to tell tales with laughter in them. It doesn’t matter if the stupid joke is on me or not as long as the words generate laughter. It allows me to look back on my experiences and re-live them and also laugh about them at the same time. Take the many frustrations of my life and weave them into the part of the story that will allow me to laugh about it.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” said the great satirist and author Kurt Vonnegut. I take strength from these words especially coming from someone who suffered much with some of the heaviest of matters throughout his life. So I am going to try to keep laughing to try and keep from crying.

So a Rabbi, a Priest and President Obama walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and with disgust says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”

Did you feel any anger after reading this joke? Even if you didn't laugh.

Rhythm

“Soul gets lost when life can’t go on its rhythmic way, and soullessness is the ultimate cause of deep dissatisfaction.” – Thomas Moore

Finding a happy rhythm in my life is important to satisfying my soul. When my soul’s rhythm gets disrupted, I feel violated. Sure, I should be able to deal with routine changes—curves in the road—but the straightaways of living are more consistent with moving forward and require much less energy than steering and navigating twisting, bending terrain.

I know, I know, many say “change is good.”  Is it? I have to say yes and no. Yes, it is good when it has a meaningful direction, say steering a ship away from a crashing reef or correcting a course to successfully reach port. Nautical comparisons aside, these types of actions prevent disaster, disarray, and failures. Course corrections can return a person to the mission or journey they were sailing toward. Sorry, left in those nautical comparisons.

Now for the No. The “no” of change is the type of change for the sake of change. I call this another way of battling the boredom that some people have for the types of things that become somewhat routine. We have heard of “shake-ups” at places or “ breaking-up the routine” of tasks. These types of change can motivate and stimulate if they are presented with transparency and input. When it is dictated without any sense of the logical reason or proof (or danger) that a change of direction is needed, faith in that change often flounders and is difficult to embrace. I will listen all day to valid reasons and evidence when given the chance because I want great finishes and successful ends to my efforts as much as anyone. But let me be a part of the conversation for Pete’s sake.

So here is where the soul becomes a tricky entity concerning change and supporting a persons healthy rhythm. Every person is different, not identical parts on an assembly line. In this comparison, you can’t shut the line down, re-tool and start-up assembly again producing a new, different or refined product. The soul is what goes into the creation and it is a very delicate blend of love, faith, hope, dreams, compassion, purpose, devotion, empathy, joy, and good humor.  For the soul to be creative—which by the way, creativeness most always leads to change—it needs to be rhythmically mentored and it is not always the fastest approach that works. “People don’t resist change,’ said Dean Ornish, “they resist being changed.”

Resistance by definition, is a body’s ability to fight hurtful and harmful things. It takes time for me to lower my natural resistance and to embrace and accept change. And with time, even the deepest dissatisfaction may fade.

Stress Is...Painful

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment ~ Marcus Aurelius

Stress is killing me. Literally and figuratively. Now don’t get me wrong, much of it is ordinary stress. Our bodies and our mind as they age are literal victims of the stress of just living and breathing and existing in time. Who would have thought you could have sore muscles from sitting hours in a tree stand hunting deer, at a desk at work or even a long ride in a car or motorcycle? I like to think of this as causeless soreness or stress…even though it hurts literally like a vigorous work-out would hurt. The price I pay for more than a half century of living.

As for the figurative side of things, relief is obtainable if you can find a way to extinguish the triggers that are causing the anxious aches and pains of the heart and mind. As an example, anyone who is a parent has said (or at least thought), “Son (or daughter, substitute at will where appropriate), you’re killing me.” Now they were not actually sticking a knife in your heart, poisoning your food or digging a tiger trap in your path to the lawnmower. But they were definitely contributing to a loss of balance in your cortisol levels. Those Fred Sanford moments. If you don’t remember Fred…Google him. To relieve those chest pains I have a couple suggestions that you can adapt to different circumstances that worked for me:

·     Screaming. At. The. Top. Of. Your. Lungs!

·     Vigorously splitting firewood with a maul and a wedge (I highly recommend this if a specific person is responsible for the stress. Visualization of what you are splitting is delightfully relieving).

·     Refer your stressor to someone who can help or even cares. I remember a specific time I was “being mean” to my daughter and she told me should would call social services on me. I wrote the number down and put it on the refrigerator and told her to call it and I was sure they would be right out to pick her up because I was “mean to her.” Footnote: she never called.

In the meantime I have to find a way to unclench my teeth and fists. Stop trying to run from what is chasing me. I was afraid to stop for fear it would catch me, but that may be actually the best plan. Slam on the brakes and get it over with. Let it pile up on top of itself like a chain-reaction freeway accident. 

Then and maybe only then will I be able to survey the wreck, access the clean-up costs and start to repair the damage. Or I could just start by screaming.