I can't help but to laugh. It's impossible to dam the chortles and guffaws that echo off of the latest circumstances of living. The past few days have provided a fair amount of muck: a painful back injury, a speeding ticket, long and unrewarding days on the treadmill of vocation, and the cliche of longing for loving during a certain mid-winter holiday. But today, where these elements could manifest as burden or pathos, they only seem to be transmutable through embracing the comedy of our daily ping-pong, and the codicils and edicts of Murphy.

Too many times I've bundled my woes into a sack and hurled them into a river of wine from the overpass of forget. The rewards of not-confronting pain or eluding it through clever self-deception are maybe physical numbness at night and wine-stained lips in the morning, with the same heathen worries waiting to resume their boogey-party on the doorstep. Is laughter evasion? I don't think so, I think it's a natural response to the temporal gnomes of inconvenience when realizing their miniscule scope in the expanse of life. I will not be defined on that fateful day I pass by a speeding ticket, it's only a turnstile I move through in my rush to the temple. Thus I must size-up all the other ridiculous problems I must face with the same energy... move through it, not be defined by it, realize its tiny impliciation. Too often we choose to let our burdens become our badges, and I once lived in a way that chose that fashion statement for me. It's tiresome, and moving from a place of victimhood to the place of victor-hood is a very long and agonizing journey. It's easier to remain in a place of personhood, and accept all these potholes and triviaities for what they are...

Big jokes.

Jokes to keep us on our toes and aware that the world is too big to be consumed with your issues. Jokes to remind us that our nature is energetic and interconnected, and that no matter the struggle, it's as resolved as we choose it to be with our openness and exertion. Jokes to knock self-importance on its ass so it can see that the world was not made for us, but made with us, and in order to exist we've got to play along and accept the inevitabilities of consciousness. Jokes where we are the punchline and the gist is to keep us humble.

A good reason why I've got this new back injury is that I chose to go snow-boarding, which I knew would involve falling a lot at rather high speeds. I put my trust in my friend Kim to show me what to do, then I had to trust my equipment and the snow to work with my intentions. Is it foolish to do such things? Yes. But for me it's just as foolish to avoid adventure. I took a risk, and it didn't culminate into a real, anxious pain until I dropped my tea cup in the office yesterday, and I bent down to pick it up. I was floored by the storm in my nerves, and while I had to focus very hard to manage the pain and breathe easily, I couldn't help but laugh. Perhaps it was an automatic reaction, but I did find humor in my sudden helplessness. Rather than feeling my survivability threatened, it was enlivened by the signals I was receiving: while there was excruciating pain, everything in my body was working the way it was supposed to... you receive pain when there is a problem. If we can experience that so easily in our bodies, why do we refute it so commonly in our daily lives? We do so much to drown the pain, and that something wrong will only grow in size and dysfunction until it overwhelms us.

There's so much to laugh about, so much to be assured by through the antics of fate and the slapstick of destiny. Rather than choosing to let lonliness on Valentine's take me for a ride, I'll ride instead through the warm eyes of a beautiful stranger, like one I met this morning, and realize that love is coming but the way there will likely involve even more pratfalls and goofiness, and that's alright by me. Rather than let a speeding ticket ruin my day, I choose to accept that it's just another bureaucratic broomstick to jump over, and whatever the repercussions of that will be, it won't make the sky any less blue. This isn't a brave or novel way to see life, but rather a coping mechanism just as valid as any other. I just can't use some other mechanisms any more, so I'll make do with what I got. Happily, laughably.

So, did you hear the one about the Zen hotdog vender? He'll make you one with everything.