Laughter came too easy
for life to pass me by
~ Gordon Lightfoot
Among the most heartwarming compliments I’ve ever received was from a fellow I met only via email and phone. He emailed to say that he’d been reading my essays for some time and would like to chat on the phone and get my reflections on a situation he was working on. At the end of our conversation, I took that rare opportunity to ask him if the Steve he just met on the phone was the same Steve he had met in my essays. I was presuming he’d say yes, since I certainly feel like the same guy, but he didn’t. He said actually no, that my writing didn’t reveal how much I laugh.
Here are a couple of recent life adventures that, if I were to tell them to you in person, would include a lot more laughter than these written words will convey. Not because the stories are funny, but because I carry under my skin a certain humor about all of life. Pretty much since birth I have found the universe to be not just infinitely loving and profoundly deep (every breath matters even if I don’t know how), but also playful. Lightness is never far away from even the most sacred or sorrowful of events. Laughter, or at least a smile—not in ridicule but in delight at life itself, and compassion for all the ways we try to make sense of it—is my most authentic expression.
A few days ago, I awoke in the joy of healing energy that underlies all creation. That’s what can happen after a night sweat of cooling relief that announces that Covid’s visit, and at least its roughest edges, are heading elsewhere. And though it may take a while for C to collect its belongings and bid a final farewell, the door has been cracked, fresh air is coming in. That hasn’t yet stopped my Covid mush brain from wondering what just happened. Maybe that’s the reason this essay feels dictated by an angel named Oddball.
Perhaps in some sort of surreal karmic balance, I also felt the extravagant suffering of those of us who harbor the freakishly agonizing delusion that we are a victim of circumstance. Might it be the most common form of human misery? I’m not wise enough to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that were so.
He or she, this or that, they and them: any and all are major causes of what we feel. Or so many of us seem to believe. Often for very understandable reasons, deliberate abuse and betrayal among them. But reasons can also include a rainy day when we wanted sun, and blaming the day for our disappointment, rather than how we have defined reality for ourselves, which is the real mother and father of every opinion and feeling we will ever have. If you ask me.
Why is there such resistance to embracing responsibility for our feelings, opinions and judgments—and instead erupting with ferocity, holding others and/or the outside world in general responsible for our reactions?
There is something about the painful quality of so much of our experience, and the undesirable nature of that pain, especially when it is ignited, especially deliberately, by the actions of another, that makes our assuming responsibility for it seem non-sensical, even self-abusive—because it just doesn’t compute.
“How is it possible,” many a mind has reasonably argued, “that I am responsible, and not those !#@!!^*, for my rage at the physical, mental and emotional viciousness they have inflicted on me repeatedly?”
Until our metaphysical sense of things is expansive enough, it’s very likely not possible, it seems to me.
So let me paint a picture that has served that expansion in me, growing my delight in the process.
While what I call life’s two most important questions (“What’s going on, and what’s the healthiest action I can take in this moment?”) are supremely useful in the practical everyday navigation of life regardless of one’s spiritual orientation, one can have the richest of lives without them. To have that, however, requires an active relationship with what is, I find, life’s single most important question: “Who am I?”
In my experience, if we’re passionate about its pursuit, that question leads us to an answer, however many lifetimes it takes to discover it, that transforms our consciousness. And it does so by freeing the deadening consequences of finding the worldly world real, including our mistaken identity as a physical being, a misperception at the heart of human misery.
The liberation of that misperception comes from the realization that we are not our body. Our body is merely the limo we ride around in. Inside that limo, we are the soul, a manifestation of God, engaged in a process of ever-more conscious realization of that reality. Beloved Yogananda states it isn’t accurate to say I am God, but it is accurate to say God has become me.
Growing our conscious realization of this truth is the purpose of life. And here comes the fun part: Every circumstance of our life from the most glorious to the most painfully perplexing is something our soul has drawn to itself to serve its liberation, its self-realization. Every breath we take, every thought, every judgment, every gratitude, every joy, even every hatred and every despair, is a gift to serve our soul’s ultimate, inevitable conscious union with Oneness, with God. We are a victim only of how we define reality.
This, to me, is the playfulness of the universe at its most dramatic. And a great contributor to my sense of humor.
One of life’s essential questions (which is to say a question that, without a reasonable answer, it’s all but impossible to cultivate a peaceful heart) is: “What am I trying to accomplish that I can control?” Victimhood is the result of being attached to outcomes or actions we cannot control. That means pretty much (if not absolutely) everything in the worldly-world sense.
Fortunately, there are at least a couple of things we can control, the most important things as it happens. Where we place our attention. How we define our world.
There’s a ton of richness under those actions waiting for our discovery. I’m just one schmoe trying to act in the spirit of the universe as I find it, but here’s how it feels to me: There’s going to come a day when I experience, not only in my mind and heart but also in every smidgen of my being, the reality of my soul: Everything is God. And when that happens, I wonder if I’ll ever stop laughing. At least inside the limo.