When you find yourself randomly spraying Vitamin D into your mouth, Googling SAD lamps and then wondering if the contraption you bought during lockdown to look vaguely human on Zoom calls is, in fact, the actual therapeutic article, perhaps it’s time to admit that the ol’ January blues have got you.
This sort of low mood is, apparently, normal. I don’t know if it’s world events, which are so grim, or the lack of light, which I seem to feel ever more acutely the older I get, but it feels particularly bad this year. So I have given in to a state of hibernation.
Since I accepted the January stuckness, I feel better than when I pretended to be OK, because I know that this too will pass. The process of getting unstuck will happen, by “embracing the stuckness,” turning towards it and letting it unstick itself. I read this on a blog called Zen Habits. And, no, I have zilch idea as to what a “zen habit” is, but I do welcome the possibility of coming unstuck.
I suspect that the zen master isn’t advocating covering your hands in rubber solution glue and picking it off like skin (something that gave me great joy when I was young) – though the constant advice is to find joy in small things…
Pass the glue.
Some of the most joyful things in life are the jokes made by children, the best jokes ever. There is a magical moment when a child begins understanding the grammar of a joke but not the logic. One of my grandsons has just hit four and has been given a joke book, which has got him preoccupied with making up his own. Here is one such gem: Q. ‘Why do trees get wet when it’s not raining?’ A. ‘They don’t.
He came out with this at a time when everyone appeared to be arguing over what is funny, what it’s acceptable to laugh at. The comedy wars make for weird entertainment: you must/must not laugh at Ricky Gervais/Frankie Boyle/Dave Chapelle/Rosie Jones. You must renounce things you have laughed at in the past, from Ali G to Little Britain. What you laugh at now must align with a particular set of political views, or it reveals them in a way that may be unflattering. And on it goes.
Watching this from my imperial position (under the duvet), I thought – as I mostly do these days, about most things – ‘Is it me?’ This may be narcissism or a fundamental disconnect, but what makes me laugh makes me laugh. Could I even be retrained to laugh at something that I don’t find funny? Indeed, why should I? Why should anyone?
In these arguments, another solemn front in the culture wars, lots of things seem muddled. Humour and laughter are mixed up with satire. Laughter is physical, and you are much more likely to do it with others than alone. The idea of a release of tension is there in Freud, and also in the Eastern philosophy that came up with Laughing Yoga, which involves breathing, clapping and chanting, ‘Ho-ho, hahaha.’ I had a go once in India, and it makes you feel so ridiculous, you may end up genuinely laughing. Whether you are laughing in the Right Way, at the Right Thing, again I have no idea, but it gets you out of the house, so to speak. Likewise “ecstatic dancing,” which turns out to be er ...just dancing .After a workshop.
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