Laughter is Freedom
They say, we should be happy that some things in life don’t cost. They’re right. Several years ago I heard Gloria Steinem speak. Actually this didn’t cost me either because I was working. She was on a book tour coming through Chicago. Steinem’s career and life are celebrated for her strides as an editor and as an activist leading the charge for the Equal Rights Amendment, uplifting women throughout the 60s and 70s. I didn’t know much about her or her career until after meeting her and later watching Mrs. America on Hulu, a reenactment of the lives and accomplishments of poignant female leaders post the Civil Rights era. When I encountered Steinem I wasn’t exactly sure who she was. She spoke for half an hour then finally an audience question and answer. Knowledgeable about high-level politics and a regular staple in D.C. for so long, a person from the crowd rightfully asked her, “what does Liberty mean… what does it mean to have freedom?” I expected a deep philosophical answer, but I was surprised at her direct, short response:
“Whenever you laugh. It’s the only time you’re truly free.”
Consider all the things in life we are left to sort out, that we are taught, and that we must learn to master, thankfully laughter isn’t one of them. No one is ever shown how to laugh; what it should sound like; or the timbre of pitch a laugh needs to be. Even infants freely giggle and smile just days after being born without knowing anything about the world or their tiny little place in it. It’s instinctive and like a birth mark, laughter is a personally unique characteristic to each of us and an infectious habit we form freely and condition day-in day-out. So if a big goal in life is to know happiness and experience a certain freedom of mind and heart, then something powerful can be said regarding the nexus of laughter and freedom.
Over the past few years— 2020 in particular— we have not really had much to laugh about. Politics, elections, gun violence, the pandemic, unemployment, and the ongoing harm rampant in our generational struggle with racist beliefs and systems. None of these genres skew such that a person might burst into rich laughter; and these same topics have been an oppressive and exasperating commonplace for too long. Laughter has been replaced by long months of anxiety, worry, depression and fear that the evolving world will change in ways that we no longer recognize or understand. And even now, as communities reopen our interactions are riddled with polite hesitations and uncertainties as we discover our tolerance to this level of change. The ongoing question we all seem to ask— post being vaccinated, post a year of wide crisis, and now at the trailing end of the coronavirus— is, “what now, what’s next?” Whatever the answer, it should include laughter, in heaping amounts.
I understand now more of what my elders meant as I was growing up, “…the more I live, the less I know.” The complexity of our relationships, our commitments, our unions and even our personal dreams seem daunting and contrived with no sufficient collection of guidelines or guarantees. We trek along our individual paths while enduring setbacks, frustrations, and surprises that dash the sacred hopes we have about the world. Hope can be a very hard thing to hold onto. We don’t admit that enough. But there can always be laughter— an immeasurable well from which hope is drawn and an infinite resource with the capacity to bestow freedom. Honest laughter has the power to jostle our spirit and untangle the twisted strings that pull us from every direction. When we laugh, for a brief moment those strings wilt and disappear. There is no weight upon our chests— no email to check, no dinner to make, no deadline, no arguments, not even are we tempted to worry. With laughter, we become untethered. We forget everything that the journey requires us to carry, and we are temporarily lifted and made free— mind, heart, and body swell in a blissful station of consoling liberation.
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[Photo: originally color, Frank McKenna]
