“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.”
–Henry Ward Beecher
The road of life is not very smooth. Instead of being like a paved super highway, life’s road has a lot of bumps. There may be some smooth sailing, but we are all going to encounter some rocks along life’s pathway. There will be an abundance of pebbles, and some of us will even encounter a few boulders.
There is little we can do to get rid of the rocks in life, but there are things we can do to lessen the jolt we get from them. Having a sense of humor is one of the most effective shock absorbers to life’s jolts. When bad things happen to us, it is usually not very funny, but if we look hard at the situation, we may find some aspect that calls for a little laughter. This idea may be hard for some to accept, but I can think of more than one case in my own life where my emotions shifted abruptly from feeling devastated to actually laughing just by looking at the situation a little differently.
One way to cultivate the ability to use a sense of humor to buffer life’s jolts is to think of things that happened to us in the distant past that seemed awful at the time, but when we look back on them now, they seem at least a little funny. One of the most traumatic periods in my life was my first year of teaching at a high school where a meek principal had allowed the behavior of the students to approach anarchy. I was put on patrol duty in the hallways in the morning before classes began, and the students were so unruly that I almost feared for my life. When I describe the situation to someone today, I find it hilarious.
When I was a small child, every time I got upset about something, my mother would say to me, “Cheer up! Twenty years from now, you won’t even remember this.” She was right. Every bump in the road will be felt at the time it occurs, but the pain doesn’t always have to last for a long time. Some of the old comedy routines, such as those of Laurel and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello, were based almost totally on the frustrations the performers appeared to suffer when things went wrong. We sometimes can hardly keep from laughing at other people’s problems, even though we may at the same time feel sorry for them. If we could just step out of our bodies and view some of our problems from the perspective of bystanders, we might also be able to laugh at ourselves.
We all need to laugh, and if we can’t find anything else to laugh at, we can always laugh at ourselves. Life has its somber moments, and there are times when we don’t feel like laughing. But laughing has recognized health benefits, and it can make us feel so good. Why not try to lighten up and do a little more laughing?
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
