Bob Haase Another Can Of Worms

Laughter Really Is the Best Medicine

Most of us have heard the phrase that “Laughter is the best medicine” and I think there is some truth to this.  It seems like the more stresses we have in our lives, the more problems we have both health related and otherwise.  It may be like the chicken and the egg as to what came first.  Was it the stress and problems that caused us to stop laughing or did we develop the stress and problems because we stopped laughing?

Yesterday I drove to Milwaukee with two other guys from Fond du Lac to help teach kids to tie flies at the Milwaukee Sentinel Sport Show.  I coordinate the youth fly tying program for Dan Small’s Outdoor Wisconsin Family Pavilion and many of the volunteer tiers come with me from Fond du lac to help teach the kids how to tie a fly for fishing.  We all face different  problems in life and we all have our share of stresses but we sure did a lot of laughing and we had a good time.  If we had stresses that day we sure forgot about them for a while and met a lot of very nice people.

I think getting involved and volunteering to do things like this not only helps others,  it also helps us by making us feeling good about the things we did.   We forget about some of our stresses and as we see and talk to others we realize that we are not the only ones with problems.  We hear about the bad things on the news, but you often see the good things when you take the time to help others.

I am not trying to convince you that it is easy to laugh when things are not going right, but I am trying to convince you to try.   I believe that you cannot laugh at others until you can laugh at yourself.  I admit that I have done my share of stupid things in my life, but laughing about them makes them much more tolerable.  When you can get together with others and share stories or share a couple jokes life seems much better. 

Life is often a balancing act trying to balance the good and the bad and things do not always go as planned.   Two days ago I had a problem replacing a blind on one of the windows in our home.  I took the old blind down, removed the old brackets, installed the new brackets,  and the new blind would not fit in the brackets.  It took me over a half hour of frustration to realize I reinstalled the old brackets instead of installing the new brackets that came with the new blind.  Once I realized this,  laughed about it, and installed the correct brackets everything worked fine.  I realize this is not as serious as many of the problems we face in everyday life, but little things often become big things if we let them.

Laughter really is the best medicine but like most forms of medication we need to use it to make us feel better.  The best part about it is that it is FREE!  

Bob Haase is the host of “Outdoors Thursday” heard Thursday mornings at 9:10 a.m. on News-Talk 1450 KFIZ.