Comfort

I hate hospitals. It’s nothing serious I just don’t like the places. Recently about four friends have been admitted in hospital and I have been forced to man up and face my fear right in the eye. So I did, I manned up, puffed my chest, took a deep breath and walked into the labyrinth that they like to call hospital. For almost everyday for two weeks I have spent my evenings and hospitals visiting these friends.

See the thing with hospitals is that it seems like it is illegal to be happy in them. Why would you smile when the person is horribly ill? That is where me and hospitals disagree. I believe that at that point is when you breed your most jovial, idiotic, crazy, sharp witted friends around you. Yet if you walk down a hospital corridor laughing you will get looks that were used to coin the phrase “if looks could kill.”

We lead our lives in such constant fear of death tha we forget without death life would be but a mundane cycle that never ends. Just like the dark thread in the blanket(that epictetus talks about) which makes the bright colours look that much brighter it is the moments of dark nature; death, illness, sorrow, depression that make the happy moments of life that much better. It is death that makes us so full of life. So why then do we fear it? The unknown. Is it the mystery (see last week’s post) or just the fact that all we have will be left behind?

I still think though, that if there is one way I would like to go, it is smiling. I would like to die with a big fat grin on my face because someone had taken my mind on that magical trip to a place where tickles, giggles, laughs and joyful outbursts reside. So come on and do it, have yourself a good nice hearty belly laugh, then make someone else laugh, let us spread the love (spread the laugh?) then watch all your problems, if only temporarily, disappear. Now, isn’t that a comforting thought?