Yes!

What is it like to say "yes" to life? Since I started to do this consciously, I have found myself in many remarkable situations. Remarkable to me that is. I don't presume to know what would be remarkable to you. I have some filters, of course. I am not saying "yes" to drugs. I am not saying "yes" to anything that would hurt someone else. But I am trying to put aside some of my patterns that have become pretty unconscious. For instance, I disliked bowling when I was young and then I think I got a little snobbish about it later on. On one birthday of mine, The Laughing Ladies needed another person for their bowling team. I was in the process of backing out. It was my birthday after all. I reversed myself and said "sure". "What should I wear?"

We had more fun than I would have thought possible. We laughed all night. And, after all, that was the purpose of the Laughing Ladies. That is the term my girls gave to us. My son called us, more derisively, "The Cackling Hens". We were friends. Instant friends. When I moved to Marblehead, MA, USA, a small sailing community on the water, and I took my daughter to enroll in her new school, these two women came over to me and introduced themselves as they observed how beautiful my daughter was. (What's not to like?) The fourth woman who joined us was a teacher whom it turned out I had met in New Hampshire when my neighbor had a Filipino faith healer visiting.

We were an unlikely mix. We all were having our struggles. Big struggles. Financial, marital, kids, old parents,career..you know the list. Each of us had a pretty challenging life. We discovered quickly that our experience of humor was mutually shared. We each pretty much thought we were extremely funny and somehow we thought the other people were very funny. This thing happened...we somehow came to an unspoken agreement that when we were together we would not get into the hard stuff of our lives. We would focus on laughter. We could start with any subject, for instance a description of our first kiss and end up rolling on the floor. As our time together built, we could laugh about how we had laughed in a previous conversation.

Soon we decided to go out to a bar or restaurant for our get togehters. Otherwise on of us had to get rid of the people at home and serve food and drinks and so on. That would cut ito our time badly. Somehow Tuesday night became our time. It was sacosanct. Fully. I would leave a meeting at my job with no apology. "I have a previous important committment." Life or death. And it kind of was. Of course, what we had started to attract other people. And sometime we invited others to come. It never worked out.

Things would be going along swimmingly and then the newby would say something like, "My father might have cancer." We would be forced to tell them that they were "out". Broke the rules. Don't think we didn't care and support each othr and other friends, BUT NOT ON TUESDAY NIGHT!

BC  had a baby on a Tuesday night. We went to the hospital with her and were kicked out by the nurse for laughing too much. She was laughing that baby out! So we went to the parking lot and continued on speaker phone until that baby came.

This went on for years and we became our own legends. I still can be almost anywhere and start to chuckle remembering what were were remembering.