The best advice my therapist has ever given me is when she reminded me how powerful it can be to laugh at yourself. She probably didn’t phrase it exactly in those terms, but she’s constantly reminding me to look at life more lightly. Not everything is a dramatic moment. Not everything is a life or death matter.
In fact, most of the time, life is pretty hilarious…
At some point in their lives, everyone will have something irritating or frustrating happen to them. It’s just a fact of life. What matters is how you react to it. You can naturally allow those feelings of anger and resentment to get to you. You can choose to be angry about getting a UTI or missing a train. And make no allusions about it — you might feel like it’s instinct, but in allowing yourself to be angry, you are choosing to be upset, choosing to allocate energy and life to feelings of anger.
Which is why one of the “life lessons” I’ve taken away from life in general is to try and approach things from a different perspective. There’s a well-known quote, which says “This too shall pass.” It’s one of my favorite quotes because it reminds me of perhaps the most salient feature of life. It’s constantly in motion. By nature, life is changing and moving all the time. Choosing to be angry and frustrated about a particular thing means that life will pass you by. The world will not wait for you to have a pity party.
“This too shall pass” also reminds me that everything in life comes to an end.
All of the successes and downfalls of each day will inevitably pass into the past. No matter how embarrassing a particular moment may have been, people will forget. They will move on. That anger you feel or that sadness will pass. Even the happiness and giddiness you feel at a good test grade or perfect date will also fade into memory. It’s a small reminder that everything is temporary and there’s no point brooding on what could have been or what should have been.
Maybe you’ve ended a toxic relationship? All of the anger and leftover resentment you might feel because of that toxic relationship will come to an end. No matter how all-encompassing and frustrating it might feel at the time, it will fade away. Speaking from personal experience, it can feel like the inner turmoil will never end. You might want to drown in uncertainty and anger. But what does that solve? Hint: it does nothing but perpetuate the problem that you’ve already taken steps to solve.
Are you thinking about one thing in particular? Or is there one moment that you can’t seem to stop fixating on?
The irony is that when someone tells you to move on, your mind is always drawn back to the times where you couldn’t, the emotions that still cause you to brood from time to time. For me, it’s grief. I can laugh at so many things about my life: my klutziness, forgetting to get a European voltage oven versus an American one, and forgetting to put sugar in baked goods. But I struggle when faced with grief. How can you turn silent and muted grief into something funny? I will be the first to admit it’s challenging, almost impossible. Losing an important person in your life can be devastating, but remembering what made them so important can make it easier.
Controversial, I know. But when I think about the stories of my mother throwing her poodle down the stairs as a child and how my dad wrecked her car during their first family get-together, I can’t help but smile. It makes the heavy burden of grief that bit lighter.
It’s not laughing at grief, per say, but it’s allowing yourself to re-find the humour and joy into something that was utterly transformed by grief into something vulnerable and scary.