Laughing at your own fate - is this the key?

Yesterday I came across this beautiful set of lines from Mr. Kuldip Salil, a professor of English Literature at Delhi University, albeit now retired. He has written numerous books and has translated famous Urdu poets to English and English poets to Hindi. 

Here is Mr. Salil, narrating these lines in his own beautiful voice (Instagram reel), and here is an image from his Facebook page:

 

Here is a rough translation of these lines to English:

I learned to laugh at my own situation,
I went beyond the border of laughter and tears.
All the difficulties of life became easy,
Even cruel fate fell in love with me.

 

I have thought a little about this concept earlier as well. I have a hunch this might be the philosophy behind the "Laughing Buddha," although I am not so sure. The whole concept makes sense to me. 

This applies to both the various troublesome situations in life and also death. Our troubles seem suddenly tiny when we think it is all show and a short dance that we get to do before we return to the ground. We are just elements that have "come to life," just like a firecracker has come "alive" as it starts to burn. We are all burning and we all know what becomes of firecrackers the next day. Our time is just a bit more than that of a firecracker.

Life is short, and we all know how it ends. There are of course many ways of dealing with the inevitability of it, but in my opinion, laughing at it is probably the best strategy, although we should not be calling it a strategy, as there is no winning at the end of life. We are all destined to be dust - someday, and hopefully a very far off day, but the fate is sealed. So give yourself a good belly laugh when you think about your own mortality!