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| German café tells customers to wear pool noodles to enforce social distancing Click to enlarge. |
Creative, friendly, and humane customer service lifts the spirits more than floor markings and perspex screens geared to keep people apart.
Friendly humor and comedy can save us humans from ourselves.
Animals are in on it, too, as this short photo essay indicates.
Is it inappropriate to laugh when, globally, close to 4.64 million humans have been infected with, and more than 312,000 killed by a mysterious and apparently fast-morphing virus?
Consider the intangible pluses:
Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina Charlotte, maintain that while prolonged traumas can cause untold psychological damage, there is a portion of people who report psychological growth in the face of trauma.
Tedeschi and Calhoun call this “post-traumatic growth” and describe it as “positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.”
Post-traumatic growth, they claim, has five facets that survivors report experiencing:
- a greater appreciation for life,
- closer social relationships,
- enhanced feelings of personal strength,
- spiritual growth, and
- the recognition of new possibilities for their lives.
They don’t specifically mention humor as an element of a greater appreciation for life, but I will. Humor and laughing at oneself and with others fits into all the bullet points, above.
Give it a try with comedienne Sara Cooper who lets “Trump be Trump” at his campaign-rally-cum-press-conferences:
- Cooper/Trump on Katie Miller and testing
- Cooper/Trump, “How to Medical”
- Cooper/Trump, “Obamagate!”
- Coooper/Trump, “Testing”
Me too, Stephen.
Let’s to continue to enjoy living while the living is possible, if not easy.
Anti-blues News
More to feel good about:- Wild white storks hatched in the UK for the first time in centuries
A Polish female [white] stork fraternized then mated “with a male [white stork] believed to be one of the ‘20 or so vagrant storks’ that visit the [UK] every year.” This year, for the first time “in hundreds of years …white stork chicks have been born in the wild” at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. “Before this, the most recent babies hatched was recorded on the roof of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in 1416.”
Immigrant storks, vagrant storks, chick storks … it’s all happening out there. (I hope the Polish female has her Brexit paperwork in order. ) Life goes on…
- A rare blue bee scientists thought might have become extinct has been rediscovered in Florida.
The extremely rare metallic navy insect, a blue calamintha bee, previously found in only four areas "totaling just 16 square miles of pine scrub habitat at Central Florida's Lake Wales Ridge," has been discovered by a researcher.
History indicates life gets precarious for many species – including human – after “discovery.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Fifty-two days of lockdown haven’t quenched my zest for talking to all the dogs, monkeys, birds, fish, crabs, dragonflies, plants, and spiderwebs that will listen.Nor have 52 days dulled my desire to conduct garden experiments.
Back in late April I experimented with laying a footpath made of recycled pond weed and waterlilies (see Day 34, April 29).
The success of that experiment persuaded me to extend the footpath around the pond edge. Accordingly, I donned waders yesterday, entered the pond, harvested excess pond weed, and formed a new section of path.
Only excess pond weed and invasive lilies are harvested so it’ll take time to form this path. I’m confident completion will conclude about the same time as lockdown level 4.
I was anxious about how the goldfish might feel about me messing around in their habitat.
I’m pleased to report that, at days end, three of the four showed up for their late afternoon snack.
If the fourth fish refused to join his friends because he was miffed at my intrusion, I hope the three help him understand I mean no harm.
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