I was recently talking to a friend and I managed to say something that made her laugh heartily. She has quite a good laugh and when she laughs she sort of bellows with a kind of giddiness that is infectious and spreads around happiness. So I said to her, “Well, I’ve made you laugh and I’ve made you cry, so now all we have to do is figure out what’s in the middle.” She shot right back, “Well, then what is the middle between laughter and tears?”

Brilliantly she had posed a deep existential question; if tears were to represent our sorrow and our disappointments, and laughter our joy and our willingness to believe, then what lies at the point equidistant to those expressions of our own inner desire? Perhaps I am taking something quite simple and complicating it too much?

Let’s say then that laughter is the ultimate expression of the Now. For when you laugh, you can’t help but be connected to your body and the moment you are in. So laughter can represent the Eternal Now.

Tears also represent a different kind of Now, where one allows forth a sorrow, a deeper affection for the weight of their burden to unfold and magically transmute these cosmic feeling of solitude into a lone drop of water. Perhaps again I complicate this question too much?

Laughter is something that can overtake you, and you become your laugh. Tears are something you make so that something can be let go of. You can save your tears but you laughter is very easily lost. And…?

Laughter is meaningless because it doesn’t pay my bills. Tears at their best might water a flower but tears never stopped any wars.

If you were in a Persian market and you were haggling to buy one laugh and one tear, what would they be worth to you? If you could afford neither, what would be a suitable substitute, hence showing you surreptitiously what lies at the perfect middle value between ha-ha and boo-hoo? Naw…

Therefore my best non-college educated guess (School of Hard Knocks, 1985) is what lies in the fallow ground between laughter and those tears is You! For you are neither your tears nor your silly laughs, and once they are gone it is only You that is left holding the bag and digging that metaphysical ditch with one arm. So what I was really saying to this laughing and often crying friend is I wanted to find her. It is You I seek between my laughter and my tears.

When you laugh, really laugh please! And when you cry, let it all out for the Earth needs your tears it seems. And when you are done sobbing and chuckling so let’s just get down to the business of discovering what sits quietly in the middle.