(Auto-generated)Hey all you wonderful people that matter so very, very much, whether you see it or not.
So I'm WSWalker, also known as Will Help.
And this is the Laughing Matters podcast.
Not simply, it's a show that can help you improve your life.
Primarily in ways you didn't know it could be improved.
So I will be reading from my book, The Laughing Matters, and make no mistake.
This is absolutely a podcast that needs to be listened to in order.
I spent like 10 years organizing this jumble of interconnected concepts so that it can
be done in a linear narrative.
A straight line from beginning to end.
And there's going to be constant references made to what we went over in the last episodes.
There's a fair amount of twists and surprises that will fizzle if you don't understand what
came before them.
In this particular ride, it's not one that you want to accidentally ruin for yourself.
Trust me, to use the clinical terminology, there's some doozies up ahead, so don't cheat
yourself out of what's coming.
So that being said, good people of this good earth, please empty your cups before stepping
aboard and let's begin.
Chapter 1.
Shared.
There are a great many things that human beings excel at, but one of the most fascinating
ones for me has always been our obsessive desire and compulsion to share that which
we've learned, discovered, created, or thought, and the cleverness that comes by way of that
need.
I mean, when you make something brilliantly, write a song that's amazing, or find a clever
workaround, or gain profound wisdom, there's this very strong basic need that arises and
demands that it be passed on.
You want someone to hear that song, to see your art, to read your words, to learn from
you, and the biggest payoff is seeing the way that it affected them.
There's this connection there, and we do thrive on it.
We're compelled to share what we know, and what we feel, and what we've found to be good,
and we've created a multitude of ways to do so on our relatively small planet.
We shape our internal wind with specific movements of our lips, tongues, and mouths, all while
carefully pitching the chords that the wind passes through so that we can speak in a language.
We literally created a spoken language out of the sounds we could make, so that we could
share what we found to be good with others.
Then we figured out how to make these words heard after the speaker had left, and started
bringing those words into more permanent form.
Written language.
I don't know what book did it for you, if a book ever did it for you, but I do remember
reading To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in fifth grade, and that was my first real moment
with how amazing reading and writing is.
I got dumbstruck that out of nowhere this author could craft the story from their imagination,
and put down these marks, and they mean something, and the story would ring out to anyone who
picked up the book.
And I'd find out, you know, in the years that followed that Carl Sagan actually said it
far more profoundly.
A book is made from a tree.
It's an assemblage of flat, flexible parts, still called leaves, and printed with dark,
pigmented squiggles.
One glance at it, and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands
of years.
Across the millennium, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly
to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant
epochs, who never knew one another.
Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
And absolutely insanely great as that is, there were some things we knew or felt that
literal language could not adequately capture.
Some ideas, thoughts, and feelings are too abstract to be put precisely into words.
And so we went the other way, more abstract.
We spoke and wrote poetically, wove epic stories with lessons and wisdom embedded in them,
told fables and analogies and parables and metaphors, or, if one was so inclined, wrote
songs or composed sonic landscapes or symphonies.
They painted, drew, or colored, choreographed, photographed, or danced.
Our need to communicate and convey is so strong that we created art, language, music, and
dance.
And then we mish-mashed a bunch together.
We even merged art, storytelling, photography, language, and music together and created films.
Because that's what human beings do when we cannot inherently do something.
We figure out a way to do it.
We are masters of extending ourselves beyond our physical limitations.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud from his book Civilization and its Discontents, mankind
replaces his muscles with motors, can now fly or swim hundreds of miles, correct defects
in his eyes with spectacles, see thousands of miles away with telescopes, permanently
capture fleeting images with photograph, and hear through telephones across distances which
would be respected as unattainable in a fairy tale.
But as clever as we are at creating ways to convey our knowledge and thoughts, our main
go-to method of expressing our feelings is our very first language.
Non-verbal sounds, facial expressions, and body language.
It happens so automatically that we rarely even think about it actively.
And that is impressive given the range of subtle changes that can be applied to convey
the subtleties of each emotion.
Little tiny shifts and changes can give away so much.
And these basic movements, they're iconic, instantly recognizable to most, and tend to
be pretty universal across our species.
Go ahead, take a moment and think of an emotion and see if you can't immediately picture
the sound and face and body language that goes with it.
Every single emotion, so far as I've been able to discern, has an accompanying sound
or face or body movement to it.
Except for one.
Now this one is fairly alarming because that one emotion is arguably the most important
of all of them.
It's not only been compared to the very air we breathe in terms of necessity, but it's
also been called all you need, and the only thing that's worth both living and dying
for.
So I ask you now, what is the sound we make when we love?
Go ahead and think on it.
What is the social sound, face, and bodily posture we make when we love?
I've asked a lot of people this question.
I've heard a lot of answers.
And I've got to say, my personal favorite was dreamy sigh, though I believe it's more
indicative of crushing or longing.
But every time people offer an answer, it always sounds more like a question, like someone
that doesn't expect their answer to be correct.
And what's funny is I'd imagine some of you have even guessed the correct answer already,
but still aren't sure it's right.
I completely get that.
And it's because it's a bit of a riddle.
The answer is located in a place that you wouldn't think to look, and you know, honestly,
I have to say personally that I would say it seems to be deliberately hidden there,
but you have your own decision to make on that.
Now, I will share that answer with you in this book.
But first, we do need to lay the groundwork.
And in order to understand the answer, we must understand the riddle and what it's using
as its main mechanic.
I want to do the best job I can teaching you these concepts.
And an answer told will always be less than an answer learned.
And that's it for me today.
Next time, Chapter 2, The Cacophony and the Granddaddy Fear.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at willhelpmail at gmail.com.
And you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I could
help.
And you know what, see if you can't figure out the riddle of the missing sound before
I tell you what it is, because you already know it.
You already do it.
I'll bet you can do this.
Until then, do yourself a favor, find something good, and find a way to convey it.
Be sweet, and bye everybody.