Serious vs. Silly

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”  C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I had a one of the students in my class, after the school year had ended on Friday afternoon and she was outside of the school front entrance on a bench with another student who had also been in my class, ask me if I had been the class clown when I was in high school. In my class I had tried to have a sense of humor with the kids. Forty-five days for 90 minutes daily is a looooong time to teach Study Skills to rammy and restless 9th graders. She thought I was funny.  

I did have them period 1/2 and most of them were still sleepy...that was a plus. Easier to dial up than dial down.    

Humor was both tactical and strategic, to keep the kids guessing to what I might say. Predictability and structure has to be balanced with spontaneity and thinking on the feet where replies and often retorts are in context to the situation at hand. Real-time. One has to avoid being insulting in humor with kids but often a correction can be couched in humor and it is like when a dog chomps down on its medicine because it is wrapped in bacon.  

So, I broadened the course into more of a "Success Skills" class and attempted to avoid being ponderous. Preachy yes, not to settle for less than their best as a goal to aim for, to live their lives with a sense of purpose and passion. And hey, these principles might just help you along to that end. When people value their lives and take it seriously, tool acquisition becomes par for the course. One is open to improvement because the conceptual gates have been opened rather than rusted shut.  I really hammered on that issue all marking period long.     

I replied that "not really" to the class clown query. I was good friends with some of the funniest kids but wasn't one of them. I think it would be more appropriate to say that I appreciated humor in my early and mid-teen years but was more of a silent partner in its creation. But, life situations and my responses to them, continued to sap me of hope and it left me hopeless and humorless. As my adolescence continued, I lost my sense of humor and life became 100% serious. In a clinical sense, without knowing it, I was in a deep depression. I had dreams of dying, going through a car windshield was a recurring dream. I no longer found life fun or funny but terribly and tragically sad. 

Not meaningless but meaningful and wondering what had gone wrong. When I learned more about The Fall in the Bible, I came to understand that the world was broken from something once whole. Like a vase that couldn't hold water anymore because of cracks in the fired clay, I no longer cried but neither did I laugh. It was a perpetual cold and dark existence of Winter. The Book of Job, in God's providence, was the first book of the Bible that I read after many years of not cracking the cover. The pathos poured off the pages. Scholars state that Job wasn't the one who wrote the book, I couldn't see how he could not be. The pain was too deep to be fictional or second-hand. 

There are odd parts where Satan and God are conversating about Job's soon-to-be trials and that can be argued that this had to come by revelation after the fact to some writer, Job or someone else. Yet, the succeeding tribulation is a searing first-hand account.    

When I became a Christian, the little birdies of joy didn't chirp happily. Instead, I felt some unbelievable and incomprehensible burden had been taken off of my shoulders. My life was still weighty but Jesus bore the part that only He could carry.  

My life still sucked. My knee still screamed in pain, my head still ached from the incessant pain messages from the knee. Yet, the bitter cold was breaking and Spring returned to my soul in degrees. And my sense of humor returned. Cynical sure, and jaded, and sarcastic. Most definitely smart-alec. But, the thawing of my funny bone, buried like a Woolly Mammoth in the permafrost of my Psyche Siberia, became alive once again. And I swung it like Samson's jawbone of an ass. 

Now, as a 53 year old, I have fully arrived into silliness station which is so far from where this journey started. This doesn't mean that I don't take life really seriously. I do. But, I have learned to lighten the load by laughing gas. To go silly rather than serious. My dilemma these days is to avoid the temptation of making the serious silly, to miss the tone in social situations in an attempt to be funny when it would be wiser to hold the tongue rather than blurt something out not appropriate. I speak from recent experience although I shall not divulge the details here. 

Keep you guessing and wondering, just like I did with the 9th graders, to both their amusement and irritation.