No foolin'.
Well, in some ways, I wish I was.
In a week or so, I will be holding another grand-baby. So, I was sprucing up a bit at the barber today (for the inevitable pics). We got talking about how little humor there is these days, not to mention the fun we used to have playing April Fools jokes on people. "Everyone is so uptight right now...", he said.
Unfortunately, that seems a bit too true.
But, I'm not, right? Well, I did recently acquire (is that the way to say it?) shingles....
There is SO much not to laugh about right now. So much hanging in the balance. So much to not ignore. So many people suffering at the hands of systemic power (not to mention our own).
It feels like there's just not much mental or emotional space left for a little light-hardheartedness. We're worn out.
But, when we get to the point we are no longer able to laugh at anything, perhaps we should pause and reconsider a few things.
In these kinds of moments, we tend to become even more binary. It gets harder to hold more than one thing at a time — it's either all bad or all good. The reality is, though, that it's not. It's really both. It always has been both. We have to continue to learn how to be honest and hold...both.
Life can be terrible. And, it can be wonderful. And, if truth be told, often at nearly the same time. This is hard for us to reconcile, especially in our minds. And, that may provide the clue we need.
What we know and what we experience are not always in the same medium. But, both sources are kinds of intelligence and legitimate. Perhaps, our highly rational habits (even though they're really not as rational as we think) are often misleading, especially in terms of all that truly informs the quality of our existence. Too often, we are guilty of using one to cancel the other. But, that is mostly due to our general discomfort with duality. Something about one-or-the-other thinking is highly appealing, but it also truncates something in us. We have to hold bad and good simultaneously.
A joke, somehow, might be a part of doing that.
So, maybe we should April Fool someone today...and let them April Fool us.
We may need that more than we...think.