I wrote in my journal: “Laughter is one’s gift to Life.”

And the greatest gift is laughter when times are dark and tough. I love the Samuel Johnson line, “I tried to be a philosopher but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”

Hasidic Jews insist that dance in face of Job-like adversity is man’s noble answer to seeming abandonment by God.

Laughter is medicine you can’t buy but priceless to your health. I can’t do better than to quote Sam Keen:

“We are always acting but sometimes the act is painful, and sometimes it is fun. To be human is to stage your own drama. The point is not to look for an un-self-conscious life of complete spontaneity. That is impossible. The trick is to turn tragedy into comedy, to change the battlefield into a playground”
(Sam Keen, Beginnings Without End).

My Scotties know this truth. I watched Albie get careless around Merton the other day. His hoof taught her to respect his donkey ways. She limped for the rest of the day, her Scottie ego bruised more than anything else. Her response? She rushed the gate on three-legs that evening when Merton passed by on the outside, to bark what I swear was a Scottie version of “Na-nanna-na-na!” yowled into the old donkey’s face!

Laughter, whether Scottie or human, is the best medicine.

I’ve attached a short video for your humor-quotient today. It’s about the woes of ’senior moments’ when the memory slips and we can’t remember. Most of us are seniors old enough to identify with Art Linkletter’s quip, “Old age is no place for sissies!” What to do? Answer: laugh, and Life chuckles along with you!

http://www.rtbot.net/play.php?id=Xv1tMioGgXI

Laugh … and enjoy! It’s your gift to Life.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine

My dogs are models of what my mother used to call “the big head.” The Scottish Terrier’s dignity and sense of ‘self’ seem at times to know no bounds. To their minds lions are inferiors and other dogs are, well, beneath their dignity!

Having ‘the big head’ may be a fact of life for the Scottish Terrier, both literally and metaphorically, but it doesn’t have to be for us. The danger of the self-importance of the “big head” is pretense to knowledge and the false confidence which follows. Long ago Charles Darwin observed that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” True education, in fact, ought to make one humble, modest, and even tentative for it exposes you to how little you actually know and to how much there is yet to learn. Dignity, therefore, balanced by humbling realities of fallibility and ignorance is what we need in ourselves and the world.

While I don’t deny that a Scottie’s ‘big head’ can get him in trouble and therefore might be a model of imbalance to be counteracted in our own lives, what I’m drawing attention to here is something more. My Scotties have enormous dignity but they are also capable of whimsical goofiness and in that contradiction I find a worthy model of harmony and balance.

It’s not easy balancing dignity and levity in one’s soul but we know instinctively such balance is necessary to the harmonious life. My Gus, who died at fifteen, sauntered and shuffled around our walled patios seemingly lost in his own wee world of scents and treasured yesterdays. He was the embodiment of the gravitas of old age. Yet, for all his years, no one performed a goofier ‘dance’ when it was time to lick bowls or for a treat. Dignity be damned; it was show time!

On the whole, however, it is not silliness but dignity which defines the Scottie soul and which evokes my admiration. Indeed, it is the enormous depth of the Scottie’s native dignity, his seriousness over life, which make his moments of whimsy stand out in bold relief.

I like that recipe of deep dignity touched by whimsy, especially as I grow older and wade ever deeper into life’s complexities. Human affairs are complicated and messy and call for the right mix of gravitas and levity. Laughter to lighten up the load, mixed liberally with heavy doses of wisdom and earnestness and collaboration, give us balance to make sense out of the nonsense of life.

My quest for order and harmony in my life and my vision of Scottish Terrier embodiment of a wholesome blend of dignity touched by whimsy merge as a life-lesson important to me.

For my own life I want poise, but I want passion within that poise; I want seriousness, but I want whimsy, too, such as can burst illusions of self-importance. I want balance in myself.

In these matters I can’t do better than to embody virtues I see larger than life in my Scotties’ character!

Joseph Harvill, publisher of Great Scots Magazine