Letter 3: To someone who makes me laugh
Today in my 40 letters of reflection before 40, I write to my Brother (who makes me laugh), and reflecting on laughter in my business
I love that nobody can laugh like us. I revel in the way that we laugh completely beyond words and sounds. To where we can’t breath and tears stream down our faces, and nobody in their right mind has any idea what’s funny because we can’t string a single piece of sense together between us, let alone a sentence. Can barely even stand up. It’s one of the wonderful gifts from mum – that ability to surrender completely into laughter.
Like spiritual surrender, I learned to laugh in accepting hardship has meaning. Is that always where that real deep laughter comes from? Do you suppose it’s why so many of the funniest people struggle with depression? Did you also used to hold yourself, and choose to remember the wisdom in knowing you’re going to laugh someday, is in letting in the laughter now? Letting it disband the forming pain-wall of embarrassment?
Our laughter is a chimera.
Part earned; hard won, walking interwoven paths between darkness and light and sharing pain together.
Part perspective – is it the way we see the world that makes us laugh? Or the laughter that changes how we see it?
Part inherited, though who can say if it came to past generations by nature or nurture. I’m glad Mum can meet us there. Maybe you can laugh with her like that alone? I cannot.
Part maybe we actually are pretty funny?
Sometimes it’s a temporary shelter in the eye of the storm. Sometimes a wild intersection of years and decades, and versions of us, all meeting at strange angles. Always a place of love, trust, and belonging. Those moments – where there’s no such thing as “too much” – stand out like Christmas lights on a dark night. I’m so grateful for them.
It took me many years to understand that the abstinence of others from these moments is not because they (or I) are not funny, or they don’t want to laugh. It’s not even that their sense of humour is radically different.
They are the outsider looking in. Laughter like that demands fluency in the power of sharing pain. Thinking over the beautiful practice of laughter we’ve cultivated, I see some part what’s special there. We both set aside reservation, and put more of ourselves in than most people are willing to – especially when we’re laughing together. More of the pain, more of the joy. More memories, sense of place, personhood, interpretation.
It’s a skill I’m gradually finding in others too. New friends who will offer up their stories openheartedly, and allow love, trust and belonging to flood in. In committing to share the sacred rite of feeding stories into the collective, those moments take on a life of their own. Their power is part of what compels us to stay connected. Real laughter is never about making fun of others, it’s about transporting us into another reality where we fit better together: it’s the call to come home.
In my business, every relationship is one of warmth, laughter and story sharing. Real laughter is soul work. Its motives are joyous and transparent, and people want to be close to that. I want to be close to that. I choose for that to be the foundation of my business. After all, we all want to learn to come in closer and belong more. Real laughter isn’t just entertaining. It’s entrancing, relational and genuinely transformative.
Thank you, Brother, for the lessons of laughter. May we share so many more 
And to you who read the letter to the end (thanks!), do you give yourself to laughter? Had you ever thought about how laughter is important in relationship building before? What would happen if you surrendered more into laughter in your business? XX
Read Letter 4: A Letter to Someone Who Ran Away
