Suddenly, little Stephen piped up: “Have a laugh, lady! Have a laugh!”
She and everyone else instantly broke out laughing, putting the incident into perspective. Thereafter, when any of us overreacted to a minor situation, someone would say, “Have a laugh!”
We enjoy humor even around our tendency to be reactive. For example, we once saw a Tarzan film together, and we decided to learn a little of the repertoire of the monkeys. So now when we realize we’re beginning to get a little reactive, we act out this repertoire. Someone will start, and we’ll all join in. We scratch our sides and shout, “Ooo! ooo! ooo! ah! ah! ah!” For us this clearly communicates “Hold it! There’s no space here between stimulus and response. We’ve become animals.”
Laughter is a great tension releaser. It’s a producer of endorphins and other mood-altering chemicals in the brain that give a sense of pleasure and relief from pain. Humor is also the humanizer and equalizer in relationships. It’s all of these things—but it’s also much, much more! A sense of humor reflects the very essence of “We’re off track—but so what?” It puts things in proper perspective so that we don’t “sweat the small stuff.” It enables us to realize that, in a sense, all stuff is small. It keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously and being constantly uptight, constricted, demanding, overexacting, disproportionate, imbalanced, and perfectionistic. It enables us to avoid the hazard of being so immersed in moral values or so wrapped up in moral rigidity that we’re blind to our own humanness and the realities of our situation.
People who can laugh at their mistakes, stupidities, and rough edges can get back on track much faster than those perfectionistic souls who place themselves on guilt trips. A sense of humor is often the third alternative to guilt tripping, perfectionistic expectations, and an undisciplined, loosey-goosey, “anything goes” lifestyle.
As with anything else, humor can be carried to excess. It can result in a culture of sarcasm and cutting humor, and it can even produce light-mindedness where nothing is taken seriously.
But true humor is not light-mindedness; it’s lightheartedness. And it is one of the fundamental elements of a beautiful family culture. Being around merry, cheerful people who are upbeat and full of good stories and good humor is the very thing that makes people want to be with others. It’s also a key to proactivity because it gives you a positive, uplifting, nonreactive way to respond to the ups and downs of daily life.
Love Is a Verb
At one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, “Stephen, I like what you’re saying, but every situation is different. Look at my marriage. I’m really worried. My wife and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other that we used to have. I guess I just don’t love her anymore, and she doesn’t love me. What can I do?”
“The feeling isn’t there anymore?” I inquired.
“That’s right,” he reaffirmed. “And we have three children we’re really concerned about. What do you suggest?”
“Love her,” I replied.
“I told you, the feeling just isn’t there anymore.”
“Love her.”
“You don’t understand. The feeling of love just isn’t there.”
“Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.”
“But how do you love when you don’t love?”
“My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love the verb. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”
Hollywood has scripted us to believe that love is a feeling. Relationships are disposable. Marriage and family are matters of contract and convenience rather than commitment and integrity. But these messages give a highly distorted picture of reality. If we return to our metaphor of the airplane flight, these messages are like static that garbles the clear direction from the radio control tower. And they get many, many people off track.
Just look around you—maybe even in your own family. Anyone who has been through a divorce, an estrangement from a companion, a child, or a parent, or a broken relationship of any kind can tell you that there is deep pain, deep scarring. And there are long-lasting consequences that Hollywood usually doesn’t tell you about. So while it may seem “easier” in the short run, it is often far more difficult and more painful in the long run to break up a relationship than to heal it—particularly when children are involved.
As M. Scott Peck has said:
The desire to love is not itself love. . . . Love is an act of will—namely an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions. On the other hand, whenever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made.1
I have one friend who uses his gifts to make a powerful proactive choice every day. When he comes home from work, he sits in his car in the driveway and pushes his pause button. He literally puts his life on pause. He gets perspective. He thinks about the members of his family and what they are doing inside the walls of his house. He considers what kind of environment and feeling he wants to help create when he goes inside. He says to himself, “My family is the most enjoyable, the most pleasant, the most important part of my life. I’m going to go into my home and feel and communicate my love for them.”
When he walks through the door, instead of finding fault and becoming critical or simply going off by himself to relax and take care of his own needs, he might dramatically shout, “I’m home! Please try to restrain yourselves from hugging and kissing me!” Then he might go around the house and interact in positive ways with every family member—kissing his wife, rolling around on the floor with the kids, or doing whatever it takes to create pleasantness and happiness, whether it’s taking out the garbage or helping with a project or just listening. In doing these things he rises above his fatigue, his challenges or setbacks at work, his tendencies to find fault or be disappointed in what he may find at home. He becomes a conscious, positive creative force in the family culture.
Think about the proactive choice this man is making and the impact it has on his family! Think about the relationships he’s building and about how that is going to impact every dimension of family life for years, perhaps for generations to come!
Any successful marriage, any successful family takes work. It’s not a matter of accident, it’s a matter of achievement. It takes effort and sacrifice. It takes knowing that—“for better or worse, in sickness and in health, as long as you live”—love is a verb.
Developing Your Unique Human Gifts
The four unique gifts we’ve talked about are common to all people except perhaps some who are sufficiently mentally handicapped that they lack self-awareness. But developing them takes conscious effort.
It’s like developing a muscle. If you’ve ever been into muscle development, you know that the key is to push the fiber until it breaks. Then nature overcompensates in repairing the broken material, and the fiber becomes stronger within forty-eight hours. You probably also know the importance of adjusting your exercises to bring into play the weaker muscles rather than taking the course of least resistance and staying only with those muscles that are strong and developed.
Because of my own knee and back problems, I have had to learn to exercise in a way that forces me to bring into play muscles and even entire muscle groups that I would otherwise rarely use or even be aware of. I realize now that the development of these muscles is necessary for an integrated, balanced level of health and fitness, for posture, for various skill activities, and sometimes even for normal walking. For example, to compensate for my knee injuries, I used to focus on developing the quadriceps—the muscles in the front of the upper leg—but I neglected the development of the hamstrings, which are the muscles at the back of the leg. And this affected a full, balanced recovery of my knees and also my back.
So it is in life. Our tendency is to run with our strengths and leave our weaknesses undeveloped. Sometimes that’s fine, when we can organize to make those weaknesses irrelevant through the strengths of others, but most of the time it isn’t fine because the full utilization of our capacities requires overcoming those weaknesses.