Lessons I'm learning from Irma pt 1

Holy crap.  This hurricane, descending upon South Florida very shortly, is a BEAST.  We safely evacuated yesterday, and wait and watch from beautiful Alabama to see what will happen.  Our neighborhood (on the Jupiter Inlet) now has a storm surge warning, and we are completely naive as to what that might mean... hopefully we'll have a home to go back to!  And if we do, hopefully it's not all wet... (our brand new laserjet printer is playing on my mind, on the floor in the corner...should have lifted that up before we went... I shan't even think about my precious Louboutins on the closet floor lol)

There are things I am learning... very quickly, and I fear I am too long winded to share them all at once, so this really is part one of lessons I am learning from Irma:

Prayer gives you peace, but humor sure does give you escape.  

Have you seen some of the Irma memes going around?  

They're irreverant, badly timed and insensitive - and that's what makes them funnier.

I saw some comments on Facebook 'I don't know how people can be laughing about this', 'This is a Cat 5 storm, people are going to lose their lives', and 'Really? Why don't you go volunteer in a shelter rather than laughing at Floridians' and I despaired.

I am honestly not being disrespectful or undermining the suffering of others, but for me to get through this - and all of the storms of life: I HAVE TO LAUGH.

If you have the ability to laugh at the vast array of poop life is going to throw at you, you are ahead of the game my friend... It's almost as if a displacement of some sort occurs and you gain perspective just by pointing at it and laughing.

When Eliza was a baby and the doctors feared there was something more serious going on, Dr K took a ultrasound scanner and placed it on Eliza's fontanelle (the soft spot at the front of a baby's skull) and said 'I don't want to alarm you, but I think a portion of your baby's brain might be missing'.  Roddy and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  We laughed on the way home about it.  We rang my mother, and giggled as we recalled the story.  It still makes us laugh today even though he was right, that bit of her brain WAS missing (she has ACC, Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum - the mid section that transfers messages between the left and right hemispheres is missing)  - the preposterous statement was so well... preposterous :) and scary and stupid we felt we could do nothing but laugh.  

It helped us through one of the biggest storms of our lives.

In Harry Potter, there is a creature called a Boggart, who when released from his dark, dank, hidey-hole becomes your worst nightmare... in the case of the book, hook nosed Professor Snape for Neville, or a Dementor for Harry... and the way you get rid of this frightening mirage is to laugh at it.  To point at it, and make it become so ridiculous that you are no longer frightened of it.  And then 'poof!' it disappears.

We all have our own Boggart's.  Yes, even you.  I know I do.  I am painfully self-conscious, and so sensitive to criticism it's embarrassing (when working in the city of London for a large FTSE 100 company I would burst into incontrollable sobbing at a small slight in my annual appraisal).  I have a whole HOST of oddities: fears that are brand new, fears that have taken a deep hold of me, fears that keep me exactly where I don't want to be... and do you know what?

Laughter is a great tool to get through them.  

It might sound silly... but for instance: I have this very real fear of exercising in public. If I am exercising and babe walks in, I will stop.  I don't like gyms for this reason (I would walk out of the gym if I didn't have headphones to block out the people, I would never go when it's really busy) and group classes send me into a spin.  All I can think of is my beet red face (not sexy exercise-y type glow; the unfit, struggling kind of hue) and my body that doesn't do all the bendy wonderful things everyone else's do... and have you seen my post-4-babies-belly?  It's enough to send me over the edge.

Are you reading this and thinking I am RIDICULOUS?  You're right I am! (and I am still working on laughing at this one) but do you know what?  You're ridiculous too :) 

Whatever is keeping you from where you want to go, whatever you are taking sooooooo seriously that you can't laugh at it - you need to let that go, or at the least let loose a little. That much I do know.

Really, is it serving you? On any level?  In the grand scheme of things, do you think you'd be able to see it for what it is? (if not, how about if a friend told you about this fear, what would you tell them? Could you see the wood from the trees then?)  Do you know the amount of power we take away from our fears when we point at them and laugh?

I would love to hear what one of your fears you have decided you will pick up, throw in a line-up, point at and laugh really hard at.  

I'm really going to work on that gym thing... You'll spot my tomato-red sweating face a mile off so there won't be any social media selfie proof of me working out but I do want to stop taking myself so darn seriously. How about you?