I used to be funny.

The reason I could get a laugh was that I said what most people wouldn’t. What humoured them was the fact that their repressed thoughts could come out of someone else’s mouth.

Presumably, this is one of the rules of comedy.

I used to be able to read the room and figure out what the tension was, the issue or politically correct motivation that was dominating the conversation.

Once cornered I would point to the elephant or perhaps the pile of steaming dung on the floor and make a few deprecating remarks about how silly it was to be so worried about a fictitious beast that could not possibly be on the 63rd floor of a city office block.

Nervous hilarity usually ensued.

Not so much these days. Maybe the pungency of the dung doesn’t translate on virtual meetings.

I still make my wife laugh, thank goodness.

What a pleasure that is and a true test of a good relationship. I can be myself around her, say crazy things, be a bit wackadoodle and she loves it. Thankfully she is still invested.

For a while now I have struggled along in a very toxic workplace where mediocrity is considered poor form because it might show people up. Everyone is operating way below their capacity thanks to an atmosphere of fear delivering insecurity, all promulgated by the leadership. A nasty situation.

It has sapped my energy and made my normal humour redundant.

Trying to lighten the mood and bring people some levity in their being is vital because most work meetings are not that important after all. Not to say that good governance and its efficient delivery is not important. It is vital to our society. Poor delivery of law and regulation is actually cancer on democracy that will eventually bring it down.

Only without some levity, all sense of proportion is lost.

Nobody knows what really matters or when to be serious or when to make decisions or that it really does not require an hour to decide if we use Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Stress is an extraordinary phenomenon. We are all struggling to cope with a pandemic and ‘that year’ where in Australia, we had drought, heat, wildfire, flood, a pandemic, and runs on toilet rolls.

It’s a challenging time to stay light.

Back in my days in southern Africa, the Zimbabweans always used to say about any grumpy individual that he had a “sense of humour failure”.

I fear a terminal case of that presently.

So I’ve been trying to figure out how to regain my sense of humour.

Meditation helps, of course, as does exercise. And yoga would too only seem to have lost the urge for that. So deep has the malaise become the only thing that seems to keep me sane is writing. It helps to put into words some of these difficult and challenging feelings.

There are days when the lightness returns and some humour is possible. I hope that those days will become more frequent as I come to terms with a difficult situation.

So keep your pecker up young man, your chin somewhere towards the sky. And hopefully, that sense of humour and lightness about the world will come back, even in these challenging times.

See, even if you just talk to yourself it can help.

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Don’t forget there is always a little giggle to be had from the aphorisms of the The Confused One