Sometimes you just have to laugh. When you open the bag of flour and it flies all over your face…when you forget that you put a new red sock in the washing machine with all your white towels…when you walk out of the bathroom with toilet paper on your shoe or backside announcing to world where you’ve been…when you discover that you went to the grocery store and your zipper was down…when you go out in public with a face mask that makes your eyes look very strange and your hair even odder, when you learned that your parent’s social filters had disappeared and you’d been accused of trying to kill him or her…when your grandchild says, “Let’s take a picture of you every Mother’s Day so we can see how many more wrinkles you have.”

You just have to laugh. Otherwise, you’d cry!

We have a choice. We can laugh or fret or cry. The choice is ours. I suggest laughter. Our hearts will be lighter, and we’ll certainly have more fun telling the story to our friends!

Will we choose to live life with a light heart or with a heavy one? The choice is ours.

Sometimes it takes a while to get to the light-hearted approach to an event. Fear, grief, hurt, anger, or disappointment may be the only response we can make at first. Maybe later, after the initial brunt has passed, we can choose laughter.

Go with a slight smile at first. That may grow into a little giggle. Eventually, we’ll give ourselves permission to have a full-on laugh. And if we’re very lucky, we’ll laugh so hard that tears will come to our eyes.

Then we’ll know that we can live with a light heart again. It may be a bit battered with some dents and scratches, but it’s whole and no longer tethered to that solid rock of I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-to-me!”

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone feels pain. Everyone experiences grief. Face it, everyone looks stupid sometime in life. How we deal with those things makes us the people we are. Choose laughter and eventually, we’ll like ourselves even more.

(adapted from BLT, Uncharted Journey, #33, p 129.)