Day 26 - Laughter is the best medicine!

"Laughter is the best medicine", a many times heard before quote. In school it was just something I learned by rote. During the carefree college days, I experienced, understood its true meaning and that's something to note. But in my busy life today, it's every other thing I dote on more and poor laughter gets the last vote.
Indeed a sad situation all too common nowadays, where laughter has been forgotten as we have all become wet blankets and dusty, old turncoats.

We have become more serious and grim and less funny than ever before. It's not a surprise then that we are all falling sick more often than earlier. We need laughter clubs to compel ourselves to laugh, that too with strangers. And we need TV sitcom marathons to help us find and tickle our rusty funny bones. The only laughter we hear (or rather see) nowadays is either in the form of LOL, LMAO or ROFL. A laughter which has lost its voice just like the songstress from yesteryear.

So I ask, where is that laughter which emanated from the bottom of our heart and our protruding belly? Or where is that full throated roaring laugh which came from the biggest guy in the nearby gully? When was the last time you laughed so hard that you cried or peed in your pants (yes, that also happens with some people)? Or when was the last time you laughed uncontrollably without any rhyme or rant?
It just seems such a long time ago, isn't it. Indeed a serious matter but laugh it off, we just can't! (ironically).

We take ourselves too seriously and attribute laughter as trivial and fluff. But what we don't realize is that it's our all time trump card more so when the going gets tough. Nothing can soften a hard stand or loosen a tight situation like good humor can. The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow, H. G. Wells once said, which all of us must remember as long as we can.

"Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone" is the popular phrase we all know. Let us break away from our hardened shells, let our hair down and be at ease with our best friend 'laughter', we all used to know.

"A day without laughter is a day wasted" is what Charlie Chaplin once said. We need to reexamine how we lead our lives to know how without laughter it gets weighed.

To sum it up, Mark Twain very rightly said, "The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter".

Its time we stopped taking ourselves so seriously. Life is too short so lets enjoy a good laugh as we are not going to last here.