Laugh
- Abraham Lincoln
While your life will hopefully end better than Lincoln’s, it won’t always go your way - guaranteed. Within the constraints of your genetic wiring, it’s up to you how you deal with that.
You may not have the parents or the siblings you’d have chosen. You may not look the way you’d have picked. The people you love may not always love you back. You may not live where you’d like. You may not have the job you want, or get the promotion you believe you deserve. If you get married, it may not work out the way you thought it would. If you have children, they won’t always do what you’d like, and they may disappoint you sometimes.
I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.
It’s sobering to note that whether you’re able to laugh when things go badly may be an inborn trait. A famous study was done using two groups of people: paraplegics and lottery winners. The study looked at these two groups’ happiness before their life-changing events, immediately following them, and then also a bit later. The immediate effect was predictable: people who became paraplegics got depressed, and people who won the lottery were elated. But after a relatively short period of time, both groups returned to their original levels of happiness -- paraplegics who’d been happy before their injuries became happy paraplegics; lottery winners who’d been unhappy and bitter before their windfalls became unhappy, bitter lottery winners.
Assuming your basic life needs are being met, you can choose to be happy if you want -- even when you make mistakes or are in the middle of some pretty awful circumstances. If, however, you’re the sort of person who chooses to be unhappy, or filled with anxiety, chances are you’ll probably succeed with that as well.
In thinking about this, I keep Mark Twain in mind: The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Thanks for reading, As always,
ANKURJIT KALITA
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