"Inner Jogging"

November is one of my favorite months.  With Thanksgiving fast approaching, it gives me the added opportunity to remember what I am most grateful for, and today I am most grateful for laughter.  I think I'd go crazy if I couldn't laugh at myself and all those unexpected things that happen in life.  My best friend told me a joke recently that pretty much sums up how I feel  a lot of the time, "My memory is so bad that I could plan my own surprise party."  I think parenting does that to you and without laughter I don't know how I would survive it all.  Milton Berle once said, "Laughter is an instant vacation."  I think that is true.  And boy do I need those mini vacations!

My 15-year-old daughter said to me recently, " I'm here to help you develop character, Mom."   I have to laugh.  Her flippant, funny remark has often been true.  It's not unusual for me to find her doing something totally outrageous like one day when I came home to find her chugging Frank's Red Hot Sauce right out of the bottle.  Even when she was a little girl she gave me a run for my money.  I'll never forget when she was about three years old and she and her cousin of the same age got a hold of the Desitin diaper ointment and smeared it all over themselves, the entertainment center, the television, and the carpet.  After the initial sense of horror in catching them doing something so awful and nearly impossible to clean up, all I could do at the time was laugh!

Dr. Joel Goodman said something very wise, "Someday we'll laugh about this.  Why wait?"  Why do we wait?  There is nothing like laughter to relieve us from our troubles.  We know from countless  medical studies that laughter is beneficial to every system in the body and helps to release stress. We should find every opportunity to tilt our head back and let out a good, heartfelt, belly laugh.  Norman Cousins tells us that, "Laughter is inner jogging."  Don't you love that? We all need a healthy dose of "inner jogging." And "inner jogging" is contagious.  Have you ever been in a room with someone with an infectious laugh?  It's impossible to keep from joining in with your own laughter.  Charlie Chaplin, one of the funniest men to ever live said, "A day without laughter is wasted."  

And from Bill Cosby, "Through humor, you can soften the worst blows that life delivers.  And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it."

Life has given me countless experiences to laugh over.  I've had to find humor in surgeries, job losses, heart attacks, and relationship woes, but parenting has been the greatest inspiration for all that is laughable.  Daily there is something  to do some "inner jogging" about.  One experience that I will never forget was when my youngest daughter at the tender age of seven misread the words from a book about Siamese cats, "You should have your cats 'sprayed and nurtured'."  Every time we hear the slogan "spayed and neutered", we remember that day.  Every time I step into an elevator, I think of when my oldest daughter was little and how she fearfully referred to them as "alligators." Or every time my middle daughter has a sleepover, I remember the time that our oldest son hid under his sister's trundle bed and reached out and dragged her kicking and screaming down underneath.  That may sound a bit macabre, but this is the same teenage daughter that thinks she is here to help me build character; who does more than her share of flashing those big brown eyes before getting into all kinds of mischief.  The whole family laughed for months because she totally had it coming.  

I'm glad that God gives us these moments to cherish and laugh about.  I hope that my "inner jogging" has brought you a little "mini vacation" today from all that is troubling in the world.  Take time to laugh, every day if you can.  Laughter truly is the best medicine to all of life's ills.  And when we come to the end of our days, I hope that those lines of laughter will be engraven at the corners of our eyes and mouths or as William Shakespeare puts it, "With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come!"