Poetry Tuesday: A Time to Laugh

Today's poetry comes from my research to find readings for our wedding (I have some time, I know, but I just love thinking about the ceremony) but I think is very appropriate to my life right now, when I'm trying to not take anything personally and laugh at all my mistakes.  I think the last one is my favorite though - laughing when plans get changed because now I get to be spontaneous - to "take a piece of life and treat it with reckless abandon"!  Enjoy!

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A Time to Laugh, By Sister Joan Chittister

1. Laugh when people tell a joke. Otherwise you might make them feel bad.

2. Laugh when you look into a mirror. Otherwise you might feel bad.

3. Laugh when you make a mistake. If you don't, you're liable to forget how ultimately unimportant the whole thing really is, whatever it is.

4. Laugh with small children. They laugh at mashed bananas on their faces, mud in their hair, a dog nuzzling their ears, the sight of their bottoms as bare as silk. It renews your perspective. Clearly nothing is as bad as it could be.

5. Laugh at situations that are out of your control. When the best man comes to the altar without the wedding ring, laugh. When the dog jumps through the window screen at the dinner guests on your doorstep, sit down and laugh a while.

6. When you find yourself in public in mismatched shoes, laugh as loudly as you can. Why collapse in mortal agony? There's nothing you can do to change things right now. Besides, it is funny. Ask me; I've done it.

7. Laugh at anything pompous. At anything that needs to puff its way through life in robes and titles. Will Rogers laughed at all the public institutions of life. For instance, "You can't say civilization isn't advancing," he wrote. "In every war they kill you in a new way."

8. Finally, laugh when all your carefully laid plans get changed; when the plane is late and the restaurant is closed and the last day's screening of the movie of the year was yesterday. You're free now to do something else, to be spontaneous ... to take a piece of life and treat it with outrageous abandon.

- Sister Joan Chittister, originally published in her book, There is a Season

(and recopied from the knot readings post)