Easy to be heavy

Are you inclined more to laughter or seriousness? Personally, I struggle with joy. Not that I don't want to be joyful, but I'm usually thinking about something; lost in contemplation; processing mentally... I simply don't think of it.

I never really thought how "easy" that is for me... and, therefore, how "difficult" it is for me to laugh. 

This piece on p. 124-125 of Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy' was like a wake-up call:

It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has always been the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art... In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about into the heavens... But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness... Seriousness is not a virtue... It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. 

That was a good reminder for me to not take myself so seriously. A challenge to do the hard work of joy... being light.

And, certainly, it is not "wrong" to be serious. There is a time and place, and there is a need for people like me. However, it is wrong to always take the easy way out. Which, in my case, is always taking things too serious.