Remember “The Scene from When Harry Met Sally?”
If you haven’t seen this iconic movie it’s a classic with one of the best nonsex sex scenes I’ve ever seen. It was brilliant. I bring this up because one of my favorite people in the world, Carleen, and I had a “When Harry Met Sally” moment at a Panera a few years ago. Today if I think about that lunch I still get the endorphin rush and smile like the Cheshire Cat you’d think it happened yesterday. I can still feel the fun living in my body, how cool is that?
We were catching up on life in general. It didn’t involve sex, well, we were discussing my sex life, however I wasn’t faking orgasm like in the movie. But we were laughing so hard I’m pretty sure I peed a little. No, I know I did. We’d just come from a session with a mutual friend of ours who did some work with us and we were going over what we’d discussed with our friend.
One thing led to another, and we started laughing. I mean laughing. The kind the starts slow like a water washing up on the shore and then turns into a crashing of waves. We laughed, we paused, we laughed louder, we paused, we laughed harder, we paused and on and on and on. We couldn’t stop. I kept saying, “We’re gonna get kicked out of here” and we’d laugh harder.
Panera was packed that day. We were obviously making a scene. People walked by with their trays and smiled. Some gave us a weird look and some nodded with approval. Some laughed with us, just more contained.
The best part? When a woman from a few tables away, said, “I don’t know what you ordered, but I want that.” Then she came over, introduced herself and said how we looked like we were having so much fun and to keep it up. We smiled agreed, thanked her and kept laughing. I have no idea if we actually ate any food. Pretty sure I didn’t because I remember my stomach hurting like I’d done ab work for days.
My point here is that laughter is magic and helps us feel so good. And clearly the feel good lingers in our bodies just like the feel bad does. Whether it’s spontaneous, stomach aching, bladder loosing function laughter or something you actively seek out like watching your favorite comedian, laughter heals and it’s also contagious.
Remember what I said above that a few people laughed with us. I know when we left Panera that day, we shared our happy with others simply by allowing the raw unfiltered laughter to happen. It oozed through the restaurant and I also know that people like trees have unseen communication systems, which means they felt the joy we were feeling. Call it energy, neuroception or magic, whenever your near someone laughing jump in and ride that joy wave with them even.