Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy

I was fortunate to retire from my traditional work career at the relatively young age of 56. Retiring early had become a goal of mine ever since I observed how much my father enjoyed his 30 year post-work life. My father was perfectly content to leave the working life behind and fill up his days with fishing, tending his vegetable garden, solving the daily crossword puzzle, taking naps and watching the home town Sports teams on his television.

When the time came for me to retire, I had an idyllic vision of spending my days in similar fashion. Finally, after 56 years, I was looking forward to being my own boss – thrilled to have the opportunity to wake up every day and do whatever it was that interested me. I believed that every day would feel like Christmas!

And those first few months of retirement really were magical. Gone was the stress of having to be available 24/7 to my company’s sales and management teams who were battling to close million dollar deals, gone was the daily 3 to 4 hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gone was the chronic sleep deficit.

It was goodbye to all that. What replaced it was the pleasure of deciding which book to read from my list of “books I always wanted to read“, fly fishing in the beautiful rivers of New England, taking long rides on my electric bike, spending quality time with my grandkids, and attending stimulating concerts and plays with my wife.

Something begin to happen, however, that I was not expecting about six months into my retirement. As the novelty and thrill of being retired began to subside I began to notice that I was experiencing melancholy moods and moments of soul searching. I was spending time reflecting on topics like past loss, the certainty of my physical and mental decline, and the uncertainty of how future generations will deal with the big existential challenges the world is facing.

Without the rigors of work to occupy my attention, my mind was set free to wander where it wanted to go and to my surprise I discovered that it often wanted to contemplate dark and doleful topics. I was not that concerned about these sometime melancholy moods because I reasoned that it is one of life’s natural reactions to harbor feelings of both happiness and sadness; and I remembered the wise old grandmother who once said: “A good day is a laugh and a cry“. Still I wondered why my pensive thoughts were increasing in frequency at a time in my life when I expected to be most content.

Then I happened to read about a study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert which could help to explain the phenomenon I was experiencing. These researchers developed a smartphone app that allowed them to collect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people at random moments as they went about their daily activities.

Using the app, Killingsworth and Gilbert asked people what they were doing and how happy they were while doing it. They sifted through 25,000 responses from more than 5000 people and reported that 46% of the people were thinking about things other than what they were actually doing at the time (in other words, they were daydreaming about something other than what they were doing). They discovered that those people who were daydreaming typically were not happy; while those who were fully engaged in their activity were the happiest. 

The researchers wrote that unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating instead events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. This “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it apparently comes with an emotional cost. “We see evidence that a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” they said in their report. The bottom line is that we’re more likely to think negative thoughts when we let our minds wander.

Maybe that is why people who are waiting in line or stuck in traffic appear to be more irritable. And maybe my melancholy moods have increased in frequency since leaving work simply because my mind is no longer required to spend 10+ hours a day focused on the demands of my job.

This study confirms that many philosophical and religious traditions are on to something true when they teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and by training their practitioners to resist mind wandering and concentrate on the here and now. Yoga teachers and those teaching meditation practices usually stress the importance of “mindfulness” or “being present” for a good reason — because when we do, it usually puts us in a better mood.

When I look back at my work career, I can see now that those moments when I felt most fulfilled was when I was in the middle of product development activities, being part of a team inventing electronic test solutions to solve complex manufacturing challenges. During those moments all the powers of my mind were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand and there was a sense that the results of the team’s collective work would have a positive impact on the company, our customers, and to a certain extent, society in general.

William F. Buckley put his finger on the unique ability that meaningful work has in preventing the onset of depressive feelings when he wrote “Industry is the enemy of Melancholy“. Simply put, if we are busy doing work that requires a focused mind it becomes difficult for the mind to wander and contemplate spirit dampening topics that are likely to cause the blues.

I happened to listen to an online homily about work that touched on a similar theme from a spiritual point of view that was given by Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron made the point that our very being is deeply influenced by our actions and that the kind of work we do has a lot to do with the kind of people we become.

People who have no work usually struggle with depression because our sense of dignity often comes from work. Those who suffer from unemployment feel not just the financial burden of a lost paycheck, but also the loss of dignity brought about from the loss of their livelihood.

When you are feeling down one of the things psychologists recommend is to get to work on a project. It tends to make you feel better because work engages the powers of mind, will, creativity, and imagination and we become awakened when we give ourselves over to a project.

It doesn’t have to be a grand or complicated project. In fact, Bishop Barron mentioned that he found that one of the things that brings him the most satisfaction is doing the dishes. His day is usually filled with meetings and intellectual activities, so it is a relief for him to do some simple physical work at the end of the day. It brings him satisfaction to make order out of a dirty kitchen and to see everything clean and in its place when he is done.

The Bishop referenced this lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” to emphasize that work is a blessing and that souls can not fully prosper when their hands and feet are idle.

“May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift”

Bob Dylan; Forever Young

Not all work is physical, though. Pope John Paul II categorized different kinds of work for the faithful. There is physical work (the work of the body), intellectual work (the work of the mind), spiritual work (the feeding of one’s soul), and moral work (charitable work on behalf of the poor and mistreated). When we are attentive to each of these categories of work in our daily life, it is then that we best fulfill our divine potential and become collaborators with the purpose of God.

I like that idea. May we all come to see our work, in all its different manifestations, as collaborating with the purpose of God and as bringing us into a more perfect union with a higher power.

There is a Season for Everything Under the Sun

One of the things I enjoy about my blogging hobby is that it leads me to discover authors who are writing thoughtful blogs on interesting subjects. I recently came across one such blog entry written by Maria Popova who was reviewing a book by Katherine May titled Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

In her book, May writes about her experience living through a deep and disquieting period that she describes as one of the “winters of her life”. The thing about the blog that caught my attention was the author’s perspective that life is like the seasons, constantly changing throughout our lifetimes.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

Excerpts from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

Our culture leads us to believe that life progresses along a linear scale from helplessness towards ever-increasing flourishing, but in reality life is like the seasons, operating in a cyclical fashion, with many periods of ups and downs. Imagining life to operate only in a linear fashion can be harmful when people start to falsely believe that something is wrong with their life if it does not get progressively better as they get older or when they need to take detours along the way.

If we accept that our lives are more cyclical, with periods containing many Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter seasons of the spirit, then we can become better equipped to understand that there will periods of happiness and sadness throughout our life – as well as periods of strength and fragility.

When you start thinking about periods of your life as seasons, you come to realize that people live through many winters in their lifetime – some mild, some severe – and that it is possible, like the trees, to emerge from those winters not only undiminished but ready for new growth.

It is reassuring to think that our winter seasons do not need to be fallow and unproductive and that they can be a productive period when we are given the time and space we need to go on growing. Albert Camus wrote “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”. If we garden the winters of the soul with care, we can set in place seeds that will bloom into future summers of strength.

Katherine May makes the observation that trees enter a waiting phase during winter where the tree has everything it needs to make it through severe weather:

“Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.“

We all need to take an example from the trees and approach the winter seasons of our life in a similar way. Retreat, face our our sadness, let go of the things in our life that are no longer bearing fruit, be nourished by the strong roots of our personal friends and communities and get ready to face the world again.

The winter seasons of our life are usually characterized by sadness that is triggered when we experience loss of one kind or another. Those of us who have lived through winters know that there are self-punishing ways to be sad, and self-healing ways to be sad. The key to skillful wintering is to learn the difference between the two so that we are stronger when the season begins to turn – just like the branches of a tree during the depths of winter are covered in tiny dormant buds that will spring to life when the weather turns.

Since we are all certain to encounter winter seasons during our life, May concludes with a warning against judging people when they are down on their luck and experiencing misfortune. It is better she writes to encourage empathy, compassion and understanding for those that we find suffering:

Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.

This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame.

Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.

This is good advice for the next time you find the seasons changing in your life. Do not despair – remember that every season can be profitable for our growth and survival. I have lived long enough to know that we can experience winter seasons during the blush of our youth and that it is possible for spring and summer seasons to joyfully populate the twilight of our years.

There is no telling when good things or terrible things will happen to us and we cannot know the entire meaning of it all, but we can know that life can be beautiful even in the darkest of seasons. So rejoice during all your seasons under the sun and remember that all our emotions and actions, both negative and positive, have important meaning and we become more majestic when we learn from them all.

I feel Alive when I’m Doing it

When the American poet and essayist Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal“; I was intrigued to learn more about her.

I was not familiar with Glück or her work even though she had published 13 books of well-received poetry over a 52 year span, served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003 and was the recipient of numerous literary awards – including the the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Bollingen Prize.

While looking into Glück’s background, I learned that she was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island. Glück’s mother was of Russian Jewish descent and her father’s parents were Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the United States and ran a grocery store in New York.

Glück’s father had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law and achieved success when they invented the X-Acto knife. Glück’s mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. In her childhood, her parents taught Louise Greek Mythology and classic stories such as the life of Joan of Arc – themes of which she would mine in many of her later poems.

She began to write poetry at an early age, but as a teenager and young adult Glück struggled with anorexia. She described the illness as the result of an effort to assert her independence from her mother and as a way for her to come to terms with the illness and death of an of an elder sister. 

During the fall of her senior year she was taken out of high school to focus on her rehabilitation. She spent the next seven years in psychoanalytic therapy which she credited with helping her learn how to think and overcome her anorexia. During this time period she attended classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked part time as a secretary – which she said did not suit her temperamentally.

Glück has been married twice, both marriages ending in divorce, and has one son. She currently lives in Cambridge Massachusetts and is an adjunct professor at Yale University.

While the subjects of Glück’s poems are wide and varied, scholars have identified the most common themes in her work as trauma, death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.

The scholar Daniel Morris observed that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy imagery still “suggests the author’s awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence“. The writer Linda Rodriguez noted that “Her poetry explores the intimate drama of family tragedies resonating through the generations and the relationship between human beings and their creator.”

Glück utilizes her focus on trauma as a gateway to a greater appreciation of life says Carol Malone, writing for the Best American Poetry 2020 book, and uses her acceptance of mortality as a way to become a more fully realized human being.

I listened to a 2012 Academy of Achievement interview with Louise Glück that I found very thoughtful. When asked why she still writes, Gluck responded:

“Because I feel alive when I’m doing it and much less alive when I’m not doing it. I write to discover meaning… It’s much less about who I am than the idea that nothing should be wasted. Also, writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too. Bad luck, loss, pain; if you make something out of it then you are no longer bested by the events.”

It’s that kind of thinking, I believe, that allows Glück to be brutally honest in her poetry. She is not writing for her audience per se, but for herself. To make herself feel more alive, to make sense of her experiences and to wrestle even the negative circumstances of her life into something positive.

Later in the interview, when she is asked how she feels about the accolades and awards she has received for her work, she responds:

“They are nice and make life more comfortable. But what I want is not capable of being had in my lifetime. I want to live after I die, in that ancient way, and there will be no knowing until that happens – no matter how many blue ribbons I have attached to my corpse.”

There is a maturity and wisdom in her recognition of the vanity of earthly awards, and of their ultimate meaningless in the face of eternity. It will remain a mystery what the afterlife has in store for Louise Glück, but, I like to think that it is certain she will continue to live on through the striking poems she leaves behind.

One such striking poem I came across while browsing through her Collected Works 1962-2012 is titled New World:

New World Poem by Elizabeth Gluck

This poem made me think about my general reluctance to wander far from home – and how my preference to focus more on the interior life than the exterior life may have contributed to “holding down” my more exuberant life companions.

Because my engineering and marketing career necessitated frequent travel, I came to realize early on that travel is overrated. It seemed to me the best part of most journeys is that moment when you finally return to the comforts of home.

I am not alone in this sentiment. It was Blaise Pascal’s opinion that all human evil comes from man’s inability to sit still in his room; and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his book Self-Reliance: “Travelling is a fool’s paradise, our first journey’s discover to us the indifference of places… Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home”.

Reading this poem reminded me that it is important for me to temper my preference for the quiet and contemplative life with a spirit of adventure as well – because I don’t want to be the lead strapped to the ankles of my beloved family or the wet blanket that prevents them from experiencing adventures that contribute to making life memorable and interesting.

Life is a balance and being a recluse can blind you to all that the world has to offer. Also, what good does it do to be floating free if there is no one to share it with?

Today, Louise Gluck lives in Cambridge MA but she has spoken in the past about falling in love with the state of Vermont when she first moved there in 1971 to begin teaching at Goddard College. She credits the move as being instrumental in helping her get past her writer’s block.

Tragically, a fire destroyed her Vermont house in 1980 resulting in the loss of all her possessions. After the fire, Louise reluctantly moved from the state where she felt so much at home.

When the reporters asked her what she intended to do with the $1.1 million dollar award money that came with winning the Nobel Prize, it made me smile when she said she was thinking of buying a house in Vermont.

Enjoy Vermont Ms Gluck – I hope you feel very alive there and maybe I will be lucky enough to bump into you someday during my New World travels to that magical Green Mountain state to visit with my beloved family connections.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing to Love

I recently facilitated a memorial service for my mother’s sister who lived to the goodly age of 100. My Aunt Jeannette Marie was a loving daughter, mother to 6 children, a grandmother, great grandmother and wife to two husbands.

The Last Photo of my Mother with her Sister

She was one of those people who would light up and make you feel good whenever you were in her presence. She always had a good word for everybody and even though she suffered tragedy in her life – her first dying in a train accident when he was just 24 – it was not in her nature to complain, choosing instead to focus on her many blessings.

With her sister’s passing, my mother, at 91 years old, became the last surviving person of that close 10 member family clan she grew up with. My mother was close to her sister and loved her dearly so it is natural that she is experiencing feelings of sadness, loss and grief. Especially because she no longer has anyone in her life who she can talk to about the “old days” and all the good and bad times they went through together as a family.

To begin the memorial service, I asked my wife to recite the poem ‘Tis a Fearful Thing’ that is believed to have been written by a Jewish Rabbi sometime in the 11th century. It is a moving poem about the intersection of grief and faith and love and it is often shared by Hospice teams with the families of those who are grieving a loved one who is nearing death.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.

One of the Five Remembrances that Buddhists contemplate during their meditation practices is this one:

I will be separated and parted from everyone and
everything that is dear to me

Anyone who lives long enough knows the pangs of sadness that come with loss. From the moment we are born and bond with our parents, grandparents and siblings; fall in love; marry; have children of our own—we are destined to endure the pain of losing someone we love—over and over again. My mother, at this point in her life, has had to say painful goodbyes to her husband, parents and 7 of her siblings, not to mention many close friends.

It’s enough to make you think that life is just an elaborate setup for suffering. But somehow we still manage to choose life. We choose to make friends, marry, bring new life into the world. We lose a spouse or partner and we decide to give our hearts to a new companion, opening ourselves up to more eventual sorrow. Are we in denial to think that death will not touch this new love too?

Why do conscious and highly intelligent beings make themselves vulnerable to the eventual pain and sorrow that comes with losing the one you love. Is love really something for fools? Is it not insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?

What is it that makes us choose to invest in love and life? The poem teaches us that it all comes down to love – because it is ‘a holy thing to love.’ Love, life, death and love again is what it means to be human.

The poem’s closing words reflect a profound truth that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit and the best character traits of the human species:

It is a human thing, love
a holy thing, to love what death has touched.

Love survives death. Death destroys the body but it does not touch love—or erase love. The body is impermanent but Love is eternal. We somehow know at the deepest level that life is about love. It may be that our divine purpose is to love, no matter how painful the loss of a loved one will be, and to send that love out into the heavens.

We choose to deeply love someone because we believe and trust that it will always keep us connected. Love becomes the unbreakable tether between those of us “here” and those who have passed on. It is knowing this that enables us to overcome our fear of the certainty of death and separation.

To love deeply is holy. Holy. Love keeps us connected to the Creator of all Beings, to all of those we have loved and all those to come.  Even though my mother is sad when she thinks about all the loved ones in her life who death has touched, she still feels a holy connection with them which helps season her grief with painful joy and a spiritual component of hope that leads her to believe she will be reunited with them someday in the afterlife.

Let us embrace that love which is not severed by death. Painful, fearful, a thing for fools? Perhaps. Perhaps for some, at first. But it is also a holy thing… A holy thing to love.

“And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”

An essay written by Susanna Schrobsdorff  and published in the January 22, 2018 edition of Time Magazine tells the story of two widows who found solace with one another despite the grief and sadness they felt over the loss of their spouses.

The two widows were Lucy Kalanithi, wife of Paul Kalanithi, and John Duberstein, husband of Nina Riggs. Both Paul and Nina published memoirs in 2016 (titled When Breath Becomes Air and The Bright Hour) – about the emotions they were experiencing while struggling to cope with their terminal illnesses.

The essayist described how the ache of loss runs concurrently with gratitude in the two complementary memoirs. The author of each book expresses a thankfulness for the love they have accumulated but at the same time describe the acute pain they feel at the thought of leaving it all behind. One emotion enables the other.

Edel Rodriguez for TIME

Susanna wondered how the two widows, Lucy and John, who became acquaintances and close friends throughout the process of publishing and promoting their partner’s memoirs after they passed away – and who are now planning for a future together, must feel as they tour together reading the words written by the two people they loved so profoundly.

“Perhaps their old lives seem woven into their new life, one love spilling into the next, families merging, past and present overlapping. All of it can exist almost simultaneously. The laws of time are so easily warped.”

A lot of people attempt to make a clean start when beginning a new relationship, trying to leave old baggage behind. They worry that holding on to the past will prevent them from living fully in the present or that it will hinder them from strengthening the emotional bonds of a new relationship.

I have learned from experience that leaving your bags behind is not really an option nor should we want it to be. My perspective is informed by the parallels my life has had with the story of this surviving couple.

My first wife suffered from Breast Cancer and passed away at the age of 45 leaving me and my two young daughters to mourn her loss. By good fortune and divine grace another woman came into my life, kind and loving, with three young children who was recovering from a different and maybe more traumatic kind of loss, the painful divorce and breakup of her family.

We met at a time when we were both hurting and vulnerable but we began to heal our emotional wounds gradually by consoling one another, by being generous and understanding, and by concentrating on things our partner needed instead of focusing on our own sorrows.

Rather than trying to erase the baggage from our past – and the more than two decades of loving memories spent raising our families that went along with it – we embraced it, weaving the lessons of our past lives into our new love and using our past experiences to form a stronger bond together.

Walt Whitman recognized that we are the product of everything that came before us when he wrote “And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths“. I am the person I am because of the people that came before me. They struggled and they prospered and they transferred their life’s lessons and blessings to the next generations so that we could benefit.

They are no longer here but a part of them lives in me and in you. “Death” is merely another word for former life—or, more precisely, another word for forms of life that have now sprung into endlessly transforming other forms of life.

What a shame it would be if we failed to propagate the beauty and sadness we have experienced during our past lives into our daily life. Doing so would make us less alive. Life is richer when we share the joy that we experienced from the past and we become more grateful for our blessings when we think back to the aches of sorrow we experienced in our past life.

While talking about mourning for her mother, my daughter once said to me that “Learning how to accept endings is an essential part of living“. There is much wisdom in that sentiment I think. We must accept endings as they are inevitable – death and life are an endless process, inseparable from each other. By taking the essence of those we have lost and making it an essential component of our daily living we honor best the lives of those who have passed on.

So if you are wise, you will take the accumulated baggage from your past, weave it seamlessly into the fabric of your present life and share it with others – so that when it comes time for you to leave, you will know that you contributed to growing new life.

In the spirit of the upcoming Holiday Season, I will close with a passage written by Paul Kalanithi, the dying father, who knowing that his eight month daughter would not remember him, wrote her this touching note to read someday in the future:

“When you come to one of the many moments in your life where you must give account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that doesn’t hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.”

May your presence too always bring joy to the world and may those you love carry it forward with them to fertilize new life.

 

“A Good Day is a Laugh and a Cry”

An ex-convict speaking at a prison ministry event I attended several years ago recalled that his grandmother always used to say to him that “a good day is a laugh and a cry”. I was struck by the wisdom in that observation and of how those two basic emotions become more important as we age and experience all the joys and sorrows that life has to offer.

Joy and sorrow are universally experienced and part of what makes us truly human – we all live our lives between a laugh and a tear. Both emotions are valuable because humor amplifies our sense of well-being while sorrow and grief help us to deal with the difficult times in our life.

Scientific studies have confirmed the benefits of both laughter and sorrow. Laughter has been shown to be powerful medicine because it helps lower blood pressure, reduce stress levels, fight off sickness, provide relief from chronic pain and even improve muscle tone.

Crying is also beneficial to our health in ways that are complementary to laughter (which is why most people usually feel better after a good cry). Crying can wash toxic chemicals out of our body and lift our moods by releasing psychological tension and exposing painful emotions that need to be addressed before we can move on.

Washington Irving got to the essence of why we shed tears when he wrote these words:

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”

This phrase also highlights that laughter and crying are not mutually exclusive. It is is important for us to recognize the humor in our life even during our moments of sorrow. One of the things I cherish most about my relationship with my wife is that In the midst of our most sorrowful moments we can also share a laugh; and in the middle of our laughter we can recognize loss and grace which can raise tears.

So, my recommendation to you is to make every day a good day and find a reason to laugh and cry. Here is one of my favorite jokes to help you get your day started with a  laugh…

Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac? He stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog.