Stay Positive Wednesday: Laughter

I've read articles that talk about how laughter is good for you. It increases your heart rate, reduces stress, etc.

But it's just good to laugh. I guess I haven't watched a good comedy in a while since I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud when watching a movie. Any suggestions, folks?

But I have guffawed out loud a few times recently as I've been reading. Good ole Montaigne offers some sound advice about raising kids: "To return to my subject, there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection [for learning]; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books."

The best laughter in my life is laughing at what my kids say or hearing the laughter of my children. And that's good enough for me.

Wisdom from Montaigne

I recently purchased The Complete Works of Michel De Montaigne because I wanted to read all of his essays since he's the Frenchman in the 16th century who invited the loose-form essay.

Since the book is over 1300 pages, not a text you want to carry around, I decided to read one essay a day, and I'll be doing that for a good while until I get to his travel journal and his letters.

But I thought I'd share some statements from Montaigne to ponder, ones I particularly liked.

From "By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End": "Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

From "Ceremony of Interviews Between Kings": "Not only each country but each city has its particular forms of civility, and so has each occupation."

From "That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them": "To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our own. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."

From "Of Fear": "The thing I fear most is fear."

So I wonder, how does your city have a peculiar or "particular" form of civility? And it seems that F.D.R. channeled an aristocratic Frenchman in one of his most famous speeches.