So Serious?

Finding Humor In Your Humanity

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It is very easy to get caught in the trap of the seriousness born of self-importance, especially when dealing with those areas of profound significance such as your relationship with God and search for existential meaning. Ironically, it becomes even more difficult to maintain lightness when you actually find that purpose for your life. If you can’t laugh at yourself, your beliefs, the pain, and life, then you are missing the whole meaning of this journey.

There’s a Johnny Cash song where he sings: “I hurt myself today…” Someone asked me how my surf session was the other day, and I sent them the video of Johnny singing that part of the song, getting a good laugh at my own expense.

I was surfing really well last weekend. Actually, a little too well. I hurt myself because I was surfing really good. I think that’s funny in and of itself.

All of the work on surf technique I’ve been doing started kicking in, but then it kicked my butt…actually it kicked my back.

It was my second surf session of the day, and even though my body has been really tight recently and in need of more stretching, I decided that because I had surfed earlier in the day that I could go out without warming up. 

I had a lapse in my mental processing, and thought I was a teenager again. I knew I should warm up, but I was too excited to get into the water. [Narrator: and we all know what’s going to happen when he doesn’t listen to that inner voice.]

A few rides in, I was ripping this wave with multiple turns and cutbacks. Really putting my whole body into the twisting, holding the turns longer, whipping back to the face upon hitting the white water. It was fantastic, until the wave ended. 

Something really didn’t feel right in my lower back. [Narrator: it was at this point he knew he messed up.]

I decided that if I really tightened my glut muscles and core, I could take some of the pressure off my lower back and keep surfing. Again, I was acting like a grom (that’s a kid who surfs). I was so stoked at how much fun I was having and how well I was surfing, that I wanted more waves! 

I was in pain but caught another wave and did a cruisey turn at the top. As I was surfing I realized that I needed to go in. So I got down onto my stomach to ride the rest of the wave into shore. 

By that evening, it was hard to stand, get up, sit down, or walk. I would be standing and the pain would hit so fast that I would end up on my knees. 

And then I would laugh.

I laughed at the ridiculousness of the pain taking me down. I laughed because it was either that or cry. I laughed because, truth be told, I have a rather expansive and dark sense of humor…even towards myself.

When I picked up a jade infrared heating mat from a friend, I basically fell down into a chair and she started laughing at how pathetic I looked. I started laughing too. And we proceeded to laugh at my walking like I had a hard night being probed by aliens. That’s the kind of friends that you want, those who can laugh with you and at you.

My spiritual teacher and friend, John-Roger, had a wicked sense of humor. His work was extremely meaningful. He helped thousands of people in the most profoundly personal ways, often being with them through the greatest challenges they would face.

Yet, in the midst of dealing with very “serious” subjects, he would lighten it with humor. I admit that I took the work we were doing much more seriously than he did. He was sincere and extremely disciplined in his focus, but nowhere near as serious as me.

What I came to realize is that my seriousness was really a way to feel important about what I was doing. It was an ego gratification. Thankfully, I’m a lot less serious these days, and am proud to be more humble.

I’ve been friends with both rock stars and spiritual people, and rock stars have got nothing on the self-importance of many spiritual people. One of the major traps of being on a spiritual journey is taking yourself and your path too seriously, to a point of making yourself more important than those you are supposed to be serving.