The world is more broken than we think it is (or maybe, than we care to know). Life can be more painful than most of us expect. However, I’ve found that many of my friends who’ve been confronted by the excruciating realities in their lives are strangely able to gaze at their brokenness with a profound tone of laughter.

No, not flippancy. Just laughter. Pure happy laughter.

It puzzled me initially.

But now I think I understand. One thing that keeps life sustainable, which perhaps even helps restore some emotional and mental health to those who’ve been mercilessly scarred and battered by the storms of life, is humour.

At some point of life, when pain has so dulled one’s sense of survival in a stormy life, when even the most skilled psychotherapists can’t succeed in restoring one’s will to sail through the rest of his life journey, the divinely ordained mechanism for restoration comes through - humour.

We can laugh all we want at the silliest jokes and the wackiest humour we may have come across, but it’s those who’ve been through hopeless despair who truly know the value of humour and who value laughter. The rest of the world may be just laughing.

Sometimes I see people like these laughing at their brokenness, and I realise how insufficiently broken I am. Maybe I must be broken enough just so I can learn to laugh at life. Or laugh my way through life. Or has it already happened?