Looking and Finding Whimsy

With joy and smiles I skip through life
Ignore the urge to act my age
Adversity just makes me laugh

Jokes, puns, plays on words make me laugh
Give in to whimsy, give it life
Act my shoe size instead of age

Every year advances my age
Though death approaches still I laugh
Work as fun lets me enjoy life

I laugh through life at every age.

The 7th prompt for the End of Summer scavenger hunt is to write a Tritina with a touch of whimsy or nonsense. The Tritina is a “half sestina” made of 3 three line stanzas with a single line envoi at the end. Like the sestina the last end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order in the following stanzas. There is no requirement or prohibition on meter or rhyme though the poem is most commonly written in tetrameter or pentameter.

This just about sums up my life’s philosophy. I’m not by nature an optimistic soul. I am at heart a worst case scenario person. I spent a good portion of my professional life trying to prepare for and then mitigate disasters. It made it quite apparent that I didn’t have near as much control over the cosmos as I wanted. That lead me to the realization that you can either choose tears or laughter. I decided to enjoy the little things, take the opportunity to laugh, chortle, chuckle, and even giggle my way along this road called life. There are some who pooh-pooh a less than dead serious approach to life as pure nonsense. But in the end we have to do what works best for our individual lives. (Yes, you can be serious and I’m serious when I say that laughter can be the best medicine.)