“Go Home”

Laughter is one of the most powerful expressions, it allows people to show their enjoyment in a given situation or to get over things that bother them by laughing them off. The inability to laugh can have quite the opposite effect, causing a mere joke to turn into an argument or something small to escalate in another way. A time I remember clearly when thinking of this subject is when I was about seven years old I had a friend, Momo, at my house. Momo was one year older than me and on the same soccer team as me, however we did not go to school together so we would only see each other about three or four times a week for practice and games throughout the year. Momo was my closest friend on the team and one of the few I actually hung out with.

One day, as previously mentioned, Momo came to my house for a few hours and we had planned to have a sleepover. Our main shared interests at the time consisted of soccer and just being active in general all the time. We went outside and just had fun for a while when a bee flew into the back of my shirt as we were running around and as a trapped bee’s instincts kicked in, I felt a sharp sting in my back and quickly realized what had happened. This clearly did not feel great and it was a new sensation, so we walked back to my house to see if there’s a way to alleviate the pain, which in hindsight, didn’t hurt all that much, but at the time felt excruciating. On the one-hundred meter walk home, I fell twice because I stepped on rocks or slipped on the wet grass, clearly this wasn’t a great day for me. Later that day we watched a movie, in the movie, the protagonist breaks the finger of another character. Momo jokingly advanced towards me and pretended to take my finger several times throughout the movie to mess with me, having not had the best day already, I started to get really upset. A couple more hours went by, we went back outside played some soccer, played tag, ran around, and more of the typical kid things to do outside. Momo began to intermittently joke around by reaching for my hand and finger again a few times throughout us being outside and I began to get more and more upset due to the bad day I already had. Eventually I got really mad with Momo and asked my parents to bring him home because I did not want him to sleep over any more.

This childish outburst caused a rift between Momo and I for a little bit because it obviously was not fair to do something like this to a friend who was just joking around with me. This experience taught me a couple things, the ability to take a joke at my expense, and that just because I’m having a bad day, I can’t let it out on other people. Momo and I are still great friends to this day and often laugh about the situation when we think of it. Not being able to laugh at the situation at the time clearly made it worse, but I believe that this is an instance in which not being able to laugh at the situation is actually good in the long term due to the lessons learned and the funny story to look back on today, about eleven years later and for many years to come. Because of this, I believe that the ability to laugh at a situation, while it can make dealing with it easier is not always necessary at the time it occurs, but more important in hindsight. People make mistakes, it is the way that we learn and grow as people whether it is at a young age like seven or even in day to day life going forward, making mistakes is okay. Laughter is a tool to help learn from these mistakes, and is intrinsic to seeing the hilarity in the mistakes made in the past which lead to being the person one is today.

Photo on Foter.com