Early this morning, I found myself laughing hard at myself for something I’d just done. I wish I remembered the action or thought that had made me laugh, but I don’t. In fact, I don’t need to know because laughing at myself is something I often find myself doing when it becomes clear to me I’ve done something that doesn’t make any sense, or is in some way counter to what I’m trying to accomplish.
Of course, there’s another way to deal with facing your own mistakes, confusion, or insecurity. You can also beat the hell out of yourself, which is the alternate path we often take. Unfortunately, beating yourself up doesn’t do anything other than make you feel worse. How can that possibly help you past your confusion?
Every time I laugh at myself, I get a feeling of relief. Laughing lifts me out of my self-involved perspective and replaces it with a much larger perspective, one that reminds me I’m part of something much bigger. With this perspective restored, I’m able to think more clearly and function at a much higher level. Here’s why: If you can laugh at it, you can let it go.
In The Slightly Older Person’s Guide to Graceful Aging, I write about the link between laughing and crying, about how they are two sides of the same coin and both perform the same miracle; they are both release mechanisms for what no longer serves us. They both help us come to a deeper understanding of what’s going on, and how we’re being affected by it.
Once you’ve laughed at something you’ve done, or cried at something that has affected you deeply, you’ve started to break free of it. You’ve created some mental distance between you and the apparent obstacle in your life. In other words, once you’ve laughed at it, or cried about it, the detachment created lets you see the apparent problem is not with you, but with the perspective through which you’ve been viewing your experience as a human.
In my work with clients, I’ve noticed there’s often a link between the hesitancy to laugh (especially at yourself) and to cry.
In my experience, laughing and crying seem to share another link. If you have trouble letting yourself do one of them, there’s a good chance you’ll have difficulty letting yourself do the other.
There’s a big price to pay when we hold in what needs to be released. What would happen if you refused to go to the bathroom (i.e., another form of physical release) for a week? Uremic poisoning. Holding in emotions that need to be released is the emotional equivalent. The consequences of holding in emotions are always more devastating than we probably realize.
It’s a very human thing to take ourselves too seriously, but every time we do it, we rob ourselves of the perspective we need to move forward in our lives. Learning to laugh at yourself is a way of recognizing and taking the small things in life less seriously. If you can laugh at it, you can let go of it.
