"A suspicion which had crossed her mind once or twice before now returned to her with irresistible force — the suspicion that the real universe might be simply silly." ~ C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
There's always a silly undertone to life when you pay attention to it.
One time, I missed two classes because I had to randomly drive a friend to the Tillamook cheese factory, and my phone's battery died because my car charger caught on fire the day before, so I got lost because I couldn't use my GPS, so I had to stop and buy an eight-dollar charger at a super sketchy grocery store in a 100-person small town to recharge my phone so I could get home. The whole ordeal largely sucked, especially since I ended up missing both my classes for the day, but I couldn't stand to be mad considering how ridiculous the entire scenario turned out to be.
And one time, after an especially mentally and emotionally exhausting day — the kind of day where I ended up laying on the floor because I was certain I was unable to do literally anything else — there was a massive spider in my apartment. Three friends and I armed ourselves with a vacuum, spider poison, a shoe and a cup and scoured the entire living room to find and kill the spider. After many screams, lots of jumping on and moving around furniture, the vacuum going on and off a couple times, one of my roommates tripping and bruising her ankle on the kitchen floor and some heroic help from a neighbor, the spider was dead. It started out as one of the worst days of this semester, but I physically couldn't even lay there and be sad about it because the silliness of the universe had different plans for the day.
I can't count how many instances I've had where I had been crying my eyes out and some stupidly ridiculous thing happened that caused an involuntary laugh to escape through my sobs. It's the most frustrating thing — facing a tragedy, dealing with my thoughts, and then, perfectly timed, I catch someone out of the corner of my eye trip and slide down a hole, or I notice my cat sitting with the most innocently stupid expression on her face. There's no conceivable sense to why things like this happen at the times they do or why they strike me as so ridiculously and simply silly.
My professor accidentally getting hit in the face with a shoe while eating a burrito. A heavy conversation transitioning directly into a pillow fight. Communal pomegranate-eating and tales of George Washington with friends at midnight. A stranger — a grown, 20-something woman — walking up to me with a handful of colorful fall leaves she picked up off the ground and giving me one as a gift. Making an impromptu trip with a friend to a book store 40 minutes away on a Wednesday night and waiting two and a half hours to meet an author I sort of like.
Honestly. I will never get over how silly life is.
It might be tempting to dismiss this argument as naive — that I'm ignoring, or maybe that I haven't experienced, the bad parts of life. But trust me, I have. Everyone has. There's not a person alive who hasn't experienced tragedies or insecurities or life's general suckiness. But, as Wendell Berry writes in his poem "Manifesto:" "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
The "facts" and suckiness of life don't have to be ignored or set aside; often, they compliment or counteract the silliness. The suckiness helps you to see the silliness, but in a lot of cases, the latter overshadows the former. And most of the time, I find the silliness much more real than the suckiness. There's some sort of real quality to the ridiculous and the funny that just isn't present in the angry, the sad, the worried, the secretive or the sucky.
If you personally haven't ever suspected that the real universe is simply silly, I would suggest giving it a try. Seek out the silliness. Let it change your mood and maybe your life. Allow the seemingly meaningless and frustratingly ridiculous moments of life shape you. Let them overtake the bad and the hurt and the "facts." Find out for yourself if the suspicion of silliness is truth.
