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I freely admit that I am a silly person.
I break into song frequently. I make puns at work frequently, to the point that people clearly know what is coming at the end of our morning meeting on Friday. My collection of rabbit shirts continues to grow to the point I could wear a new one every Friday (which is Rabbit Shirt Day) for four months and not repeat myself.
Partially of course, it is simply in my nature. But partially, it is also a thumb in the eye of the system.
The world - if you let it - will make you serious. It will make you consumed with rage and the need to react to anything - everything. It will teach you that everything is an emergency, that fun is something confined to the edges and corners of our lives rather than a central part. Let it go long enough and it will convince you that silliness is the hallmark of fools and the unserious, not "people making their way in the world".
I have experienced that - I have been those things at one time. What it did give me was seriousness. It also gave me a lot of issues I have spent years working my through.
Fight the system. Be silly.
One of the many insidious aspects of the inversion is how it detours all paths to joy into the various forms of misery. The afflictions and pathologies and angst and bitterness have become features of who we are, literal brands of our identities to which we are supposed to celebrate as they enslave us to the darkness.
ReplyDeleteSo many of the young have been steeped in this notion that they should embrace and embody the various frailties and wounds of the fallen life with great seriousness while also consuming themselves with the seriousness of their feelings as they run aground against the predictable shallows of a life in which the map is is nearly diametric to the reality of our terrain.
The result is a lack of joy. An inability to find humor and levity and a mass of downward pressure on generative creativity in art and humor and music as well as in the pedestrian architecture of everyday life. A great dullness animated by anxiety and depression. The spawn of denying truth.
So many are serious about what is trivial and transient and flippant and dismissive about what is joyful and transcendent.
I too enjoy being silly and taking great care to not take myself too seriously. But this only works when buttressed by the gift of grace and discernment to know the time and place and circumstance in which seriousness is called. I am a very serious man when it comes to the truth and my people and way of life. But I have not smothered the silly to get here. The silly must go on!
Anon - Thank you for the very thoughtful and prescient comment.
DeleteReading your comment, I am intensely reminded of much of the writing of C.S. Lewis. He wrote a great deal about joy (Good heavens his autobiography was entitled "Surprised by Joy"). And if his writings are any indicator, he knew how to see the joy in life.
As you say, the current milieu is quite different. We are encouraged not to take joy in anything or see beauty until every "problem and issue" is resolved. Being a young person is hard enough; being a young person today bearing the weight of the world's "wrongs" must be crushing.
You also make a good point about taking care about knowing when we cannot be silly, where seriousness is called for. At least for me, this took a long time to get to, although I think on the whole I can "read the room" as to when it is appropriate and when it is not. And I will say that even in some serious situations, a slight dose of silly is enough to break a logjam or dead end and give all a chance to come for air.
The silly must indeed go on!
Way to go, TB, Teacher!!
ReplyDeleteThank you! Although I do not know how much of a "Teacher" I am. Perhaps more of "What not to do" than "What to do".
Delete"Fight the system" reminds me of the mantra of the sixties from the anti-establishment types then. If everyone went along with everything then a boring and gray world it would be. Knowing WHEN to do silly and seriousness....aye.....that's a gift all right. Have at it TB........:)
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - It is very much from the 1960's. It does make me have a greater pause in that many of those that shouted that mantra have now become "the system".
DeleteOne might argue that the modern world seeks to make everything gray and boring if for no other reason than grey and boring is predictable. Silly is definitely not.
Off to begin the shenanigans...
I have two plaques on my office wall — "Today only happens once; make it amazing!" and "Be silly sometimes." That pretty much covers everything.
ReplyDeleteWarren - Both of those are right on target and if one walked out the door every day bearing those two thoughts in mind, ours would be a better (and merrier) world.
DeleteAlthough I am probably not considered to be silly by my peers, I would think they would label me as someone with a good sense of humor and someone who tries to find the humor in any situation over the worst.
ReplyDeleteEd, that qualifies in my book. There are people that seem to have no sense of humour nor can see the humour in any situation. Such abilities make situations easier to bear, which is a win in my book.
DeleteSilliness just does not compute to me. My nature is serious, I think having something to do with the tendency to take things literally. The hardest part is that people often misinterpret seriousness as being angry or unhappy. This is not true! (And tends to be frustrating). Dan, on the other hand, can be joyfully silly. How two extremes manage to meet in the middle is something of a mystery.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, my most recent manager (who just retired) was much like you in this regard. I had a number of times where I aid something that was bordering on silly and it got taken seriously. I had to learn to modulate what I said a bit and make the comment or point in other ways. But that experience, more than any other, reminded me that not everyone seems to see things in the same way in this aspect.
DeleteThe Ravishing Mrs. TB is also much more serious than I am. But to your point, some opposites seem to work in this (and other) aspects.