There are few things I believe in more than our fundamental need to laugh and be fools.
I am 23-years-old, and although I'm young and not old, I understand now that the fools in our lives are probably the wisest ones of us -- the ones who don't take everything as seriously as everyone else, and if they do, masquerade it in humor.
In real life, I am a fool. I spam group chats with 20 consecutive messages that I know are going to bombard everyone's phone with comments that are far beneath my maturity. And yet, these are reviving group chats that no one has spoken in a week, reviving the conversation and connection among all of us that we might have taken for granted.
I might be a fool -- but I know what I'm doing, and I know, from teaching my middle schoolers, that engaging people in an obnoxious and excessive way is far better than not engaging them at all.
This isn't to say that I never get serious, because I do, almost all the time. But what fun is life if it is always serious, if you were always trying to prove how good, competent, smart, and kind you were? Why deny your natural human nature and try to put aside your humanity?
Do you know who the biggest fools I interact with are? Teachers. The best teachers and the most resilient teachers I engage with make jokes and act like complete idiots, but when they teach, and when they interact with the kids, it's crunch time, and time to be serious about our business.
Human beings always need an outlet, so why is humor not one of those outlets that's widely accepted?
Sometimes, being a fool is all we can do to cope with how absurd and ridiculous life is, and as I wrote about Kierkegaard yesterday, life is very absurd and extremely ridiculous. Almost nothing makes sense, and sometimes things make no sense against our favor. Experience this nonsensical reality where humor the only way to make sense of nonsense is to not take seriously the nonsense.
As a self-confessed fool, my foolish antics and chats always have a purpose. I might not always be as intentional at the moment as I am in retrospect, but there's no such thing as wasting time, and there's especially no such thing as wasting a laugh.
We all have the phase where we take ourselves too seriously, and we have phases where we take nothing seriously. The beauty and balance is in the in-between, and if you need to laugh, dance around the room, spam a group chat, and take nothing seriously for five minutes.
In the times where you, like me, feel like you're going insane and losing your mind, sometimes the best thing we can do is let ourselves laugh hysterically -- what else is there to do?
