Laugh with me. Cry with me.

"The achievement of bringing someone to tears, is infinitely greater than the achievement of bringing them to laughter"

"We laugh all the time. And easily"
(Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker.^[1] He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996)

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Lucky me, I also cry easily.

But I cry easily at stupid stuff.  

Like over sad animal stories. Oh, and at the happy ones too.

Like at the big reveal of those gardening make-over programmes.  
Like National Anthems (everyone's. All of them). 

Like whenever anyone wins anything, or loses.

You can imagine I am a puffy-eyed wreck during the Olympics.

Mr Gladwell is right.  We do seem to laugh all the time.  Although I propose that not all Laughs are equal.

Neither are the Cries.

The Laughs

The most common is the 

Joining In or, I am One of You laughs.

The one you do when you don't really know what you are laughing AT but it feels more comfortable to laugh than not.

It is a shallow laugh.
It is a social nicety laugh.

In that it is a Getting Along laugh, it is a superficial but positive heh-heh-heh.

I am ok with that.

There is the OMG! I can't believe you just said that laugh.

This is accompanied by hands covering eyes or mouth, a *gasp* and some furtive looking around.
You love it, but you hate it.
You are also glad that whatever was just said, was said by someone else.

See, the technicality that YOU were not the purveyor of whatever-was-said, protects you.

You can laugh at this, and not be a complete bitch.

The rarest, most elusive and, most healing laugh is the Belly Laugh.

Now, this one is the one that will clear your soul.

Your entire body and mind surrender to this laugh.  

It purges and drives tension away - that's why often you feel quite weak after a good ol' Belly Laugh.

What makes this special is that only very special people can make you Belly Laugh.

If you have some of those people in your Life, you are blessed.  They are as essential to well-being as a good internet connection and a freezer full of chocolate biscuits.

Crying

As I have mentioned, I do cry fairly easily.

As someone who completed a Pet Bereavement Counselling course in the hope of being able to help clients, I am a big fat #fail.
You see, I am unconvinced that crying along with Crying Clients helps much.

That aside, yes, I well up fairly easily and fairly regularly.
Stuff moves me.
Eyes get watery.
Empathy = welling up

But, what is, thankfully, rare is the Full Sob of Sadness.

These are reserved for those extra-close, extra-special people or real-life sad or bad situations.

It doesn't happen much, I am happy to report.  But I am glad that it does.
It means that I have extra-close, extra-special people in my Life.

And, it occurs to me, as I write, that they are often the same people that Bring on The Belly Laugh.