Laugh at yourself

Sadly, many don't. Millions of people take themselves and their lives so seriously that they refuse to recognize the absurdity of much of what they do. Not that everything in life is a laughing matter.

The other day, was watching Golmaal 3 with my family. Shreyas Talpade plays a hopeless stutterer and many scenes pertaining to him were very funny.Inspite of being a mild stutterer, i was very comfortable watching Shreyas fumble!.

There have been zillion times when I have fumbled when talking to someone and it hasnt been that easy managing to get out it. In tranquility, when i have tried to recollect the situation and analyzed the fumbling point, I have found the entire procedure very funny and absurd. Stutterers like forensic experts, try to recreate the scene of crime and analyze what went wrong.  What they infer is just a pattern, but no solution.The inability to take this analysis to a logical conclusion is a tough pill to swallow and many tend to lose their sense of humor.

The only commonsense approach to this predicament lies in the ability to laugh at yourself and a total acceptance to the forces of nature.Its like releasing a built-in safety valve.

In Viktor Frankl's deeply moving book, Man's Search for Meaning, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp (during World War II) tells the server to ladle the soup "from the bottom" because the odds were better they might get a rare pea or piece of carrot. The situation certainly is nothing to joke about, but Frankl observes that many people retain as much of their pre-internment personality as possible-including their sense of humor.

All of us are mature enough to understand that life is extremely unfair. We just have to make the best use of what we have. An innate ability to be tickled by your shortcomings keeps you sane and prevents you from jumping the wall!