Slow down and laugh
Author, speaker advises to take time for laughter
Do you ever feel like the world is a fastspinning merrygo-round and sometimes you just want to get off?
Award-winning author and speaker Phil Callaway aims to help people deal with the busyness of life in a presentation taking place Monday at Park Meadows Baptist Church, 2011 15 Ave. N. “Slowing Down in a Speeded Up World: Laugh Again with Phil Callaway” starts at 7 p.m. Admission is free, with a freewill offering to be taken during intermission.
Callaway, based in Three Hills, Alta., is the best-selling author of 25 books including “Laughing Matters,” “I Used to Have Answers…Now I Have Kids,” “Making Life Rich Without Any Money,” and “Family Squeeze.” His daily radio program “Laugh Again” is broadcast across North America.
He’s a big believer in the importance of laughter and agrees it’s crucial to find time to laugh each day as we try to make our way in a world where the pace seems to be continually increasing.
“The stats on (laughter) are amazing,” Callaway says in a phone interview. “Just the physical aspect of laughter is as helpful as going out and rowing a boat.” Finding humour even in difficult situations has been shown to help people weather life’s storms.
“Learning to laugh in the hard times of life,” Callaway calls it, adding he uses humour in his messages “to help the medicine go down.”
Callaway says it’s important to make time to slow down periodically and take a break from the hectic pace of life.
“The No. 1 most repaired button on an elevator is the ‘Close Door’ button,” he notes. “We’re in such a hurry we can’t stand still for two more seconds.”
One of the contributors to life’s fast pace is technology, which enables us to be connected 24/7 — but often at the expense of personal face-to-face connections.
With his own kids, Callaway says there was a family rule of no phones at the dinner table. “We eat together and talk together,” he adds, pointing out that families need to “recognize the importance of simple acts like that.”
Callaway says that rule also applies when he’s eating out with a group. The cellphones are placed in the centre of the table and “we’re just going to visit. The first guy who picks up his phone pays for the meal.”
He recently came across research showing that “depression can be directly linked to the time spent on Facebook.” The problem, he says, is some people get into comparing their lives with other people’s lives based on Facebook pages, and can become depressed when their lives don’t seem to measure up.
Callaway has found some Christians seem to have the view that humour is somehow unChristian, and he has even been taken to task for using humour in his message. “There’s no record of Jesus laughing, why do you?” he has been told.
“We’d be dead without the incredible gift of laughter,” he adds.
For more about Phil Callaway, visit his website at