Laugh Your Way To Good Health

1. Would you have more happiness? Get a gratitude attitude. Minimize your complaints. Maximize your thanksgiving. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” said Thoreau. Love, light, laughter. The smile of a child. The ripple of a stream. A sparkling star. A rainbow.
2. A sense of humor can over ride the worst of tragedies. Take Helen Keller, born deaf, dumb and blind. One day when someone asked her if she could feel colors she immediately responded, “Oh yes, I can feel blue.”
3. Would you have more happiness? Then daily train yourself to laugh at yourself, in particular if you have reached that point where the years are slowing you down and you are tired of being tired. Like telling the story on yourself that when you get up some mornings you feel like it’s the morning after…and you didn’t do anything the night before.
4. Would you have more happiness? Be a beacon of joy. . The next time you feel an overwhelming desire to find fault, sew your mouth shut until the feeling goes away. Or perhaps another way of putting it’ don’t needle – use one.
5. Happiness is being committed to a cause, to something that sets you on fire, that warms your very being because you are concerned with the happiness of someone else as much or more than you are for yourself. Happiness is having a principle you are willing to stand up for.
6. Did you ever see Stir Crazy? It starred Gene Wilder as a man named Harry. It was one crazy movie that exaggerated the art of accentuating the positive. First, Harry is thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Does this get Harry down? Not on your life.
7. He just keeps smiling and driving all the prison personnel crazy with his positive attitude. They hang him by his wrists for several days and he just breaks out with thanksgiving. “Thanks you. Thank you. Thank you. You just solved my back problem!”
8. The guards then lock Harry in a little hot box beneath a boiling sun. When they release him several days later he begs them to leave him there a little longer. “I was just starting to get to know myself,” he explains.
9. Finally, they throw happy Harry into a cell with a 300 pound murderer who gives a new meaning to the word crazy. Doesn’t faze Harry at all. When the guards return they find Harry and the crazy murderer laughing over a game of cards.
10. Harry may well be called a man who has pursued happiness to a crazy extreme…but why not? Isn’t it just as crazy to look only for the miserable? To fall in love with negative thinking? To argue that the glass is half empty and that what is left isn’t worth the space it’s taking up.
11. When was the last time you laughed at a tragedy? Maybe just the other day when you were relating something that happened many years ago. Now it is funny. Then it wasn’t. Time does that. It gives a new perspective.
12. What am I saying? I am saying make jokes such as “My insurance policy covered falling off the roof. It just didn’t cover hitting the ground.” A good attitude won’t make you able to laugh at every miserable moment of yesterday but it will help you to learn from it, and sometimes even enjoy the humor in it.
13. Have you smiled a few times while reading this? Are you smiling now? Good, go give your smile to someone you love before it fades away.