Irrelevancy and my First Belly Laugh

I was given a ride home one day from a Buddhist class by my friend Julia.  In the car, I hummed a little portion of closing chants stuck in my head.  This lead to the free spirited Julia and I singing the chants again to each other.  The chants were the call and response type known as kirtan.  I’m a quiet type of person so its unusual for me to sing or laugh loudly; I’d usually stick to a soft chuckle as a form of expression.  But here in the car we sang audaciously, much louder than we sang in the class, Julia's energy rubbing off on me. 

            Some background to this story of my first big belly laugh is a certain attitude I have towards how people should, versus do, converse.  For whatever reason, growing up I decided its easiest and best that when people talk, they should essentially logically dispense information; what they say should be on topic, quick and to the point, and obvious to the listener.  I’d always listen to my mom’s sudden mind offshoot topics with incredulity at how she speaks without giving simple, obvious, justified context to what she said.
             I also had a similar attitude about what was spoken, not just the semantics; in conversation I believed in what I termed ‘relevancy’.  Relevancy to me means you pre-digest what you say, so that it is relevant to the listener, and all the irrelevant bulk is weeded out and left behind in your brain, unsaid.  This means a story should only contain details relevant to the story.  I balked when people did the ‘friend’s -mother’s-gardener’s-son’ thing when they explained the relationship of themselves to another person in a story.  I found it so irritatingly irrelevant, superfluous, to add so many details to a story that had nothing to do with the ‘friend/mother/gardener’ and maybe or maybe not nothing to do with the son of that relational trio.  I’d think to myself, why don’t they just say ‘a guy’ – perfect, quick, easy, keeping the relevancy quotient high in relation to the point of the story.

            On this ride home, Julia tells me of some of her recent experiences traveling in India.  She talks about the culture there, where she stayed, how she liked it.  Then, Julia remembers a chant that she really liked and wants me to hear.  She says that a man she knew in India taught her this great chant that goes like this, but she can’t remember exactly how it goes or what the words are (its in a native Indian language), and sings it for me. 
            The chant was a line long, and she repeats it four times.  We are sitting in her car, parked, in front of my house, and I’m ready to take off.  In a shaky voice, she chants possibly babble in some Indian-sounding dialect in a very American accent, and she knows it.  The four repetitions don’t even sound the same each time; she’s changing her singing as her memory reaches for the chant’s long past heard, forgotten rhythm.  I’m chuckling, my mouth is agape, and then we both start laughing.  I say to her with an honest laugh ‘I like how you sang that four times’, while my mind said ‘four times of the same chant is So Irrelevant!’.  I find irrelevancy to be cute, funny, improbable in its impracticality.  Julia pauses, and says ‘yeah, he [the man who taught it to her] only sang the chant once’. 

This totality of irrelevancy lead me to erupt with Julia into my first ever full belly laugh.  It was funny to Julia too, in more of a ridiculous way due to her singing.   She didn’t know my laughter was responding to her singing as well as to her wreaking of my ingrained concept of relevancy.  My laughter wasn’t loud but it took all of my body with it; I was squealing in waves streaming out from my crunching lower abdomen.  I said bye to her between our peals of laughter and continued laughing, hard, to the picture of her chanting aloud her multiple glorified lines of awkward sounding Sanskrit in the quiet car.

            Well, my grounded attitude has been stirred up by a number of changes to my viewpoint over the past year.  My view towards ‘relevancy’ has been reworked as part of the change, coupled with greater awareness that I am harping on and creating unnecessary punishment to myself by harping on this.  As well, I came to notice that my logical attitude of relevancy was actually an impediment to creativity.  Now I try to sit back and watch the spark of originality and authenticity as someone’s story comes more alive with irrelevant details.   And if it leads to a full belly laugh, all the better.