For Laughter
My inbox sees a lot of struggle–writing that the world should read, stories that are unfolding now in the heads of people you ought to know. People who can’t remember how to love themselves because disgust with who they became spreads like spilled ink over the story of their lives they are trying to rewrite. But we are all constantly becoming something, we are constantly trying to outrun the unchecked spreading shadow of the past. If I could control something in the world, I would make everyone’s vulnerabilities visible. Running like ticker tape around our waists. And if we all did that, we would know, Facebook be damned, that no life is perfect. No one is the parent they want to be or the partner they feel they should be–everyone is struggling. Everyone is suffering. We don’t teach our children, and no one taught us how to exist peacefully and love the beauty of our lives in spite of that struggle.
We can’t stop trauma. I am not so ungrounded an optimist as to believe that somehow we will be able to stop it altogether. But if we stopped living in sheltered delusion–stopped striving for a perfection that is not only elusive but does not exist–perhaps we could accept ourselves, our lives, our human failings. Perhaps we could make each day’s struggle conscious and visible and in recognizing that universal struggle, we would find compassion and understanding first for our former selves and then for the people around us. If we shared the burden, we might as a human community, overcome its weight.
It may sound like the world I propose is a downer. But I have been working toward this for a while, and I know that with the solidarity of being known and accepting ourselves comes laughter–that unselfconscious, unbridled, belly laughter that makes us forget the crookedness of our teeth and the particulars of where we are–and it comes more easily. That’s why I do what I do. I love laughter more than anything.
The writing prompt we’ve been working on this week is from Donald Barthelme’s short story “I Bought a Little City.” It’s a story about control and playing god. And the directive is to imagine the asshole that’s controlling your life. Imagine his or her personality, the insecurities and humanity that make them decide to do what they do. Or imagine yourself in control of some previously uncontrollable part of the world. How would that go to your head? How would it alienate you?
