I was around both laughter and tears today. That’s not especially unusual although it deserves mentioning.

Both are windows into the human heart. What is life without laughter and tears?

Should we find ourselves distant from either one, why is that?

We awake momentarily alone while we emerge from sleep to life in a new day. Perhaps we have someone dear close by. Perhaps not. Either way, we enter into life where, inevitably, most of us will be in contact with others. Should that not be the case, we must manage the nature of solitude.

If we do interact with others, is it to the degree that we know their hearts and do they know ours?

I wrote recently about vulnerability. The opposite of vulnerability is security. We can think of security in many ways. One way is to imagine a fortress with all sorts of defenses to keep the world at bay. A heart constructed so is not really a heart. It is a piece of stone. Sometimes, this is the only way a person can imagine surviving, as the attacks have eaten away at the beautiful things that make us alive.

How sad this is. Do some of us, who are fortunate enough to live in a different place, have the means to relate to such situations in others? Perhaps some of us have been there and have emerged, scarred, fortunate to survive. My world is home to people like this.

I also come across people who are in the grip of dark things. It is one thing to be influenced by dark things … after all, each of us experiences this. It is another thing to be in the grip. It is hard to laugh or cry when one is in the grip of dark things because a heart of stone is not inclined to either.

A person who laughs and cries easily, without contrivance, has a lightened sense of being which is void of pretense.

I feel most at home with people whose lives are void of pretense. I pray that I may be so, also.

I saw people today who moved swiftly between laughter and tears as if that were the most natural thing in the world. They were not simple minded. In fact, the highs and lows were purely reflections of the lives in play.

For, in fact, joy and sorrow are merely two sides of the same coin. The coin is the reality, while each side is but a reflection of its essence.

As I sit down to compose my thoughts, I am grateful that both laughter and tears are companions and that my security is not in a manufactured fortress but in its opposite. An act of surrender whereby the stone dissolves into flesh.

Heaven knows this to be true. Hell is not interested.

Let the laughter ring loudly and let the tears flow freely. And, let each of us live fully in such a life.