Laugh With Me

I was told that Mercury just came out of retrograde. I really have no knowledgeable understanding about what that means, but I will concede that there has been a flurry of obstacles and scheduling messes lately, so why not blame it on a planet's backward movement. By far, the best cinematic scene from this period of time was this one...I was on a late train home from the city when it stopped moving and we were told to get off in Newark and wait for another train. No big deal...yet. It was a freezing, windy, February night. We were crowded like sardines in a stairwell waiting. The next train arrives and we all get on and soon this train, too, starts to falter. We are told at the next station that we should get off or take our chances to see if it makes it further. I have a few more stations to go. After a chorus of mumbling and cursing throughout the car, with the shared looks of "you're f#@!g kidding me, right" or "what are we supposed to do now" half the train gets off. I stay on because I can't picture how the alternative would turn out. In the middle of this, I get a recorded call from school announcing a delayed opening for the next day. Today was already declared a snow day, requiring major adjustments. It is now 10:00 pm. I think of who might be willing to get me at this hour and my awesome, young neighbor from my old block comes to mind. She's the one who will show up with her baseball cap on, in good spirits, willing to help. I quickly text her and she agrees to come get me at the next stop, bearing that we get there. We do, so I get off, not realizing in my fast effort to come up with a plan that I would probably get to my station if I just stay on. The station I get off at is deserted. No one gets off with me. The wind is blowing the snow off the roof top of the station and I am freezing. Not a soul is around with the darkness lit only by the station-lamps. I don't know on which side of the tracks my friend might arrive and I can't see the parking lot on the other side. As I stand there wondering why I got off and how crazy this scene feels, I look at the station and the icicles hanging off the roof and the shimmering sparkle of the icy snow blowing past the station lights and I think, "I have to take a video of this; it is too wildly beautiful." I take my phone out and it is dead. I laugh out loud at the moment I am in. Fortunately, it was too cold for unsavory characters to be out, so that fear quickly left like my steamy breath into the frigid, night air. There won't be a video to share and now I realize I'm waiting a bit too long, and I can't reach anyone. I climb up the stairs of the overpass, which turn out to be treacherously icy, to get to the other side of the station. I'm going slowly and I'm afraid she will leave if she has been sitting there long. To my warm relief, there is the minivan I recognize with its Obama sticker on the back. Thank goodness. I got in the car, grateful for my friend's presence and help, and laugh some more at the absurdity of how the first day of the week is going. The rest of the week continued in this fashion. Life is made up of these kinds of moments, days, weeks, for some, even years. It is what we do in them that is of interest to me. 

Of the great spiritual teachers, writers, or healers (for lack of a better word) I know of who talk of suffering, the ones I trust the most have a common trait. They know how to laugh and when you meet them you smile because you can see in their smile an abundance of genuine joy. They might talk about suffering with great seriousness and yet, they have a great sense of humor. This is no coincidence. They know pain and so they can know joy.

When I was in college, I had to give what was called a senior colloquium to graduate. We had to present a thesis of sorts to four professors sitting around a long table. What mine was about doesn't matter so much, but the overall feeling had a gravity to it. The hour or more was supposed to have the feel of a conversation, but I remember not being interrupted very much. I can still feel the palpable stillness in the room after I finished my closing statement. I wasn't sure what it meant. The only comment that I remember was from a professor who had a voice and a look of an older Sean Connery. With his full white beard, in his tweed jacket, and that very particular voice he said something to the effect of, "well Jean, for someone who can take such a heavy stance, where does that smile of yours come from?" For years I thought it was just nervousness and sometimes it most definitely was. But, as I look at photos of myself throughout my childhood and even today, I hold the same smile and it does not feel like nerves setting it off. I can speak of suffering and stay with discomfort because I can also smile and laugh easily. Without seeing the joy and humor in moments like standing outside a freezing train station with a dead phone and a delayed school opening to start the next day, this life would feel like too much to bare on a regular basis, let alone the more significant issues that arise in sickness, divorce, financial insecurity, and war. In retrospect, I think my smile always held self-healing and, maybe even unknowingly, healing for others. And the great thing is now, I can actually cultivate it. We all can.

How do we laugh? How can we find our smile amidst so much daily stress that comes our way? I do better when I can see my life in its larger context, like a movie. Things are not happening to me. Things happen and I can look at my life as an observer and marvel at what is there. In moments like the ones that night, to be able to step back and change the stance from what feels like a personal affront ("NJ transit sucks"...I heard it around me as if the transit company was intending harm), to "wow, we are all in this together and what a mess it is," without blame, is what makes it go from hell to humor or at least to wonder. As I got off the train, I wanted to wish the conductor an easier day tomorrow. He still had the rest of the stalling train ride to get through. For me to get through, it took a kind of inner pause button to see beauty, even in the uncomfortable moment, and to want to take a picture. It's like pausing a movie to digest a scene. When we can be still for a moment, we have room to see, to remember what matters, to recognize that we are not alone in it all, and maybe even to laugh at the intensity of the moment instead of react in upset. I was exhausted and I did not like the way the night was going, but it was my life in that moment and I'd rather be there experiencing all of those sensations and emotions than not be alive to feel them at all. I might as well stay present to my tiredness, to my frustration, to my fear, to my anxiety and to touch my interconnectedness to everything around me. From that place, I can smile. My teacher would say, "and this, too." How can we welcome this, too. We might as well since we are here in it. With that acceptance, we start to see what there is to marvel at and enjoy right now. In the end, everything worked out that week. People showed up and helped. Everything got done. Gifts were given and received, as crazy as it all felt. 

I write about subjects like pain, struggle, loneliness, and sadness and if you've been around me, you also know I smile and laugh a lot. I love people who bring that out in me. As I write that, I feel inspired to bring it out in others more. As the week went on and more obstacles came my way, I definitely had moments of thinking I had to "get through" this week, which I never like to feel. But still, I "rolled with it," as one friend described it. In the rolling, I laughed much like I did as a kid rolling down the grassy hill in my backyard.