I get a fair amount of my Buddhism from comedians.

Garry Shandling, who spent years close to Thich Nhat Hanh’s community and died too young in 2016, used to tell a story about the day he told a joke to a room full of Buddhist monks. One of the monks was the Dalai Lama.

The joke was an old bit about the Buddha never marrying, because his wife would have nagged him for meditating instead of taking out the trash. Shandling told it. The room went silent. Three American monks in the back laughed themselves sick. The Dalai Lama did not follow. 

Shandling had to walk him through the whole premise, the American husband accused of being lazy, before His Holiness got there and said so, in two words. Shandling later summed up the exchange as “a three-minute gap from the joke to the laugh.”

Before kids, my wife and I took a long cross-country trip in an RV. We ate cheap, thanks to her endlessly resourceful RV cooking, except on Sunday mornings, when we allowed ourselves breakfast at a diner. One Sunday, somewhere in Virginia, I picked up a dog-eared menu and found this line printed across the top: 

If you don’t have a sense of humor, you have no sense at all.

I still think about that menu, especially on mornings when just sitting down to meditate feels like a chore.

what am I taking so seriously?

Human trouble is serious and it is not serious, both at once. When I make the effort to actually notice what is happening in a given moment, I eventually see it: what I call my life is mostly a stream of mental events, tied to some worry about the past or the future.

Seeing this, my heart relaxes, a little.

We are in a mess. Real suffering, real despair, all around. And yet one persistent signal keeps broadcasting the news that everything is fine anyway.

The old texts read like telegrams, arriving a few thousand years late, telling me to relax.

Nothing lasts. Everyone gets bothered. And there is no fixed one in here to be bothered in the first place.

This can sound cold. But the view that seems bleak at first turns out to be a rest stop. Everything changes, distress is ordinary, get over yourself already, and there is no permanent self required to do the getting over. That is not bad news. That is a relief.

It only sounds absurd if we take ourselves too seriously. It took me a while to hear it.

Leonard Cohen has been on my playlist for years.

There is a line in “Anthem” about how the broken places are exactly where the light comes through. I hear it and think of humor working the same way. A joke finds the crack. It shows us that the things we run into, the things we assume are solid and heavy, are not quite as solid as advertised.

And if we wait, a little joy gets in through the same crack.

Ajahn Chah once pointed at a boulder.

He asked a student if it looked heavy. Very heavy, the student said. Ajahn Chah answered:
“It is not heavy if you do not pick it up.”

Further reading

• come on in, the water’s fine
• a slow, simple life
• lower your standards and relax