A Good Laughter

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Good things taste nice. Like a bite of a warm chocolate chip cookie that tastes great! Or a peal of good laughter with friends after a long, hectic, and tiresome day.

Well, it’s not the laugh you make with mama mboga over the tightening state of affairs in the country, about everything doubling up in price; where you have to decide whether you’ll eat well and have a comfortable toilet time or eat just enough of your ugali so that you don’t have to go after every meal when mother nature calls, but the price of toilet paper equals that of ugali. Naah, not that despairing laugh. This one is the kind you don’t have to think hard to produce. That which in the middle of the road or a matatu, you remember what it was about, and you laugh afresh. That which you laugh your heart out till you are between a hick up and a stitch, and you know too well you can’t take a joke anymore when another one lands. 

That’s the one we’re talking about. It is refreshing. You will agree that a dose of such laughter on the weekend is enough to charge you for the week unless you don’t know what that feels like. Or you can not recall the last time you had a reason to smile. Well, that’s a story for another day. You certainly won’t need a shot of tequila to gladden your heart. A good laugh makes merry the heart.

Surprisingly, something good and nice can become unbearable, even to death. Not by its redundance that it bores you to death, as many say, “figuratively,” but it’s so good until it gets painful. To the point, your body can take no more, and you die. We’ve had so many die of a sorrowful heart from stress and chronic depression, which is quite common. But a good laugh?

During medieval times, the Romans conjured a new tool for torture. The victim would have their feet dipped in salty water, and the torture master would have a goat lick their feet. Weird, right? The science is simple. Of the slowest and least adaptive receptors in the body are the pain/pleasure receptors. They simply don’t learn. A goat’s tongue is relatively rough, so every square inch of the foot is generously supplied with stimulus. The victim would laugh till he could take no more, then he laughed a little more in pain and exhaustion till his ribcage could simply sustain function no more, and he would hilariously give up the ghost.

Photo credits: Angel Barnes

Similarly, the city hilariously swallows up the life of its inhabitants. If you were a guest and stopped by for a late latte somewhere along Kimathi Street or Moi Avenue, the barrister would take their time, but not the beggar down the street. Even the beggars, the differently abled, broken and needy, genuine and ingenuine alike, have to style up to keep up the pace of the busy commoner. Let alone the tout who has to keep chasing his matatu after screaming destinations all day at the top of his voice, holding a banner whose figures in price are also busy on a race to hike with every changing position of the sun. 

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Back then, this was only a trend for the males, but lately, the females have also been brought up to speed.  This may be a little foreign to the lad in a Lexus, but the one thing common to them all is the city’s pulse. It has a heart of its own that beats at a certain pace. The city in the sun, a stone and concrete garden, with sky-crappers like climbers dizzyingly creeping through its skies, drives all and sundry at a given pace. It runs at a higher frequency than the rest of its kind. 

And this is true also for the economic growth and opportunity it comes with. It fetches a boon for the economy, though at a cost slightly higher than human physiology would wish to pay. What to a newbie would be a thrill of life in the city, to the everyday workman is a goat-like cycle that constantly licks the salt off their hands at work. And the human anatomy being similar across all children of Adam, the brain gets to a point and says, “Thank you, I’ve had enough.” But by this time, the human machinery is taxed so greatly that all that is left is a sickly, depressed, devitalized being. And when they no longer can match the pace of the city’s heartbeat, it expels them and leaves them to retire to their farms, but leaves no energy for them to be cultivated anymore. And the old years are spent as we see the old man in the village. Can you relate?

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 But there is a wise class that knows when to call it quits before their brain decides the irreversible. They take a rest after a good laugh. And know when to leave the arena while the joke is still sizzling, only taking a dose just enough for the week, leaving the rest of the agenda for the next week. Like Monday, only coming once a week, but with an output that sets the pace for the rest of the days. Then it takes its rest until the next week when it is in the spotlight again. Having spent enough of its hours, not doing shoddily or embracing mediocrity but just enough as designated for it, it smiles at you when it takes center stage once more to set precedence in its never-ending cycle.