Not long ago I wrote about the giddy pleasures of the tall-tale form in the wildly exaggerated physical courage of Pecos Bill. Today I want to say just a few words more about the trusty shield of cream pie to the face.

According to research cited in the New York Times, laughter produces endorphins. The physical act of laughing, like any vigorous exercise, triggers the release of this “feel-good” chemical in the brain. It just plain feels good to laugh. We relax, we find new friendships through humor, we lower our guard. In fact, the growing international movement known as “laughter yoga” is taking this powerful tool into schools, workplaces, leadership seminars, and community organizations all over the world as a way of combating stress and raising productivity. There doesn’t even have to be a joke – it’s not an intellectual process where we find something funny, and then we laugh. Just laughing (fake, forced laughing sustained for a few minutes) will lead to genuine laughter. You know you’ve succumbed to giggling fits, laughing for no reason until tears run down your face. Rather than a silly thing to do, it’s actually a powerful tool for promoting well-being.

Now consider what happens with fear and stress. The chemicals released by the brain under the influence of fear and stress are adrenaline and cortisol. These are the life-saving fight-or-flight hormones that prepare us to snatch children from the path of oncoming cars or withstand pain during emergencies. All our defenses are on high-alert, and when running away from a tiger, that’s a good thing. But chronic exposure, especially to cortisol, from daily stress and anxiety can have serious adverse effects on the body and on cognitive function.

Gallows humor has long been understood as a powerful antidote to danger, uncertainty and risk. Prisoners in concentration camps or POW camps, soldiers on the front lines, first-responders and emergency room personnel, and citizens of repressive regimes have always found comfort and respite in laughter. It is recognized as an element of resilience, a way to bolster courage despite dire circumstances. Rather than mocking or making light of a serious situation, gallows humor can offer the body a chance to recover its internal balance when the going gets rough.

So here’s the good news for Lion’s Whiskers readers. Children love to laugh. On the whole, children laugh way more than adults do every day, and that’s a wonderful thing. They are naturally equipped to boost their courage with the help of laughter. Does this mean you have to be a stand-up comedian or have an endless supply of knock-knock jokes?  No, but it is a reminder that sharing family stories with your kids, especially the “most embarrassing moments” ones, is a great way to let your guard down, strengthen family connection, and counteract the harmful effects of stress. Don’t wait for an anxious vigil outside the doctor’s office to tell a funny story – tell one to your kids today.

Candles are magical. The Lovely K. and I light candles at dinner most nights, and try to bring someone into our circle of flickering light as we do so – grandma and grandpa, friends far away, soldiers fighting in wars, someone who is sick or facing a difficult challenge. Making the candle’s flame part of a ritual enhances our reverence and our awareness and our gratitude for our meal. It always seemed to me that having this special fire available on a nightly basis made sense, that it would be a way to make fire a familiar member of our family instead of an exotic and dangerous stranger.

I taught K. how to light matches and how to blow out candles without spraying wax on the table.

Her school has a number of traditions that involve the children lighting and carrying candles. These events are beautiful and spiritual, and tell the kids, “We trust you with this special gift.” The children are always careful and make themselves worthy of our trust. When I was a child, we had special candle holders from Germany for the Christmas tree. Each year on Christmas Eve we would turn off the lamps, light these candles and then sit, almost breathless, watching them fill the living room with candle light. This would last ten minutes or so until my parents reached the limit of their nerves and we blew them out. Beauty with danger added magic to the expectation of the night.

Now, in my adult life, I am privileged to know a good and generous woman of Swedish descent who hosts a Santa Lucia party each December at dawn on the saint’s day. The grown-up guests rouse their children from sleep at 5:30, and bundle them into the car in their pajamas. We reach our friend’s house, where the walkway is lined by blocks of ice with candles glowing inside. We are ushered into a darkened living room and given unlit candles. The sleepy children squirm and whisper and are shushed; adults fumble in the dark for seats and give surprised greetings when they discover who is sitting beside them. When everyone is assembled, our hostess waits for quiet and then lights one candle to hold before her. She tells the story of Santa Lucia, who came in a time of famine and darkness and cold in Sweden, with candles on her head to light the way, and her arms filled with food for the hungry people.

The children listen to the legend, hushed. When the story is over, all faces turn to the dark staircase where a faint glow is now visible. Down comes Santa Lucia, in a white dress and red sash, with a beautiful crown of flowers and burning candles balanced on her head.She walks in a circle of golden light. The moment brings goosebumps. The beauty and danger of the fire lights us all to a peak of awareness; we feel gratitude that there is goodness and generosity in the world. We sing the beautiful Santa Lucia song as the flame is passed from candle to candle, filling the room with light. We know the sun will rise in a few more minutes, and we’ll have a Swedish breakfast and sing Christmas carols. In an excited huddle the girls speculate which of them will be chosen next year to wear the white dress and the crown of fire. “I would be too scared!” the younger ones say, or, “I hope I get to do it!” the older ones whisper. Soon we’ll leave the party while the morning is still fresh, our hearts full of courage to face the darkest part of the year.

Please go here for our 5-Minute Courage Workout: Playing With Fire

Just like I coach parents to do with their children, I gave myself the freedom to choose.  I yelled back to my kids “Don’t push me.  I need to do this on my own without any added pressure, thanks! Just give me a minute to regroup. I’m not sure I really want to do this yet?”  I weighed my personal pros and cons for completing the climb.  I asked myself what I was really afraid of and how realistic it was that the tower would completely collapse at the very moment I was climbing the final ascent—after more than 100+ years standing!  I wasn’t THAT special nor my karma THAT bad.  I engaged in some positive self-talk, like “I can do this.  My kids will be proud of me.  I will get to see the majestic view.  I will have done my ‘something that scares me’ thing today.  I can cross this climb of my list of things to do in life.” Basically, I needed to outwit, out think, my fear.

Eventually what worked was to just focus on what was immediately in front of me.  I didn’t look down, and I didn’t look up.  We tend to scare ourselves the most with thoughts of the future or regrets from the past, instead of just tackling what is right in front of us.  The old adage that I now apply to writing for this blog, especially, is to never underestimate what I can accomplish in 15 minutes of focused activity.  I may not know exactly what will come of all this research, talk, and writing about courage—and I may even have to suffer through noticing more my own cowardice than my courage in the process—but I just have to keep showing up. 

The good thing about writing this blog?  It forces me to look for opportunities where I can boost my courage quotient—especially in front of my kids.  It keeps me real.  Hopefully reading our blog inspires you, too, to bring awareness to the areas where you and/or your child are social courage climbers, but perhaps more likely to quit physical courage challenges?  Perhaps you’ve camped long enough as a family in the moral courage camp, and it’s time for a spiritual courage climb?  Regardless of whether you are camping, climbing, or quitting in the various areas of your life, it takes intellectual and emotional courage to reflect on the choices we make and the ripple effects in our lives and the lives of our children. 

When I was a teenager, we heard that two kids from a rival high school had been “parking” near the reservoir late one Saturday night. A news broadcast interrupted the music on the radio to warn that a dangerous serial killer with a hook for a hand had escaped from a hospital, and was being hunted by police in the area. The teens heard some scratching on the car, and without pausing to investigate, the boy put the pedal to the metal. That car spit gravel as they spun around and sped back out to Route 35. When they got back to the girl’s house, they were horrified to find a metal hook dangling from the rear bumper, still bloody from where it had been ripped out of a man’s arm. Swear to God, totally true. My cousin’s friend’s dentist’s baby-sitter knew them.

This spook story made the rounds when I was a teen in the 1970s, whispered in huddles of girls in the school halls and in the cafeteria. In fact, it had been steadily making the rounds since at least 1960, when this particular urban legend was first “reported.” We greeted the news as marginally credible, totally gross, and perfectly thrilling. Sociologists and folklorists have been collecting such urban legends for years, trying to tease out what these contemporary “myths” reveal about our culture, just as anthropologists search for cultural clues in ancient myths. In the case of the Bloody Hook, the consensus seems to be that it’s an effective warning not to go out necking with your boyfriend on Saturday night. Sex = mortal danger, in other words. We were happy to repeat the story, enjoying the thrill of grossing out friends who hadn’t heard this “totally true story,” yet, and speculating on how likely it was that it actually had happened.

And every Halloween, there were “reliable” reports and warnings about people who gave out poisoned candy and apples with razor blades in them. We didn’t really believe it then, but I’m sorry to say that the “reliable” reports have gained potency year after year until now there are communities where Trick-or-Treating is a relic of a “safer” past. Parents are too fearful to let their children go door to door and risk being given chocolate laced with strychnine or arsenic. However, if you go to Snopes.com (the premier hoax-busting website) you will discover that there never has been a case of a person maliciously poisoning candy to give to Trick-or-Treaters.

Why are we so ready to believe our neighbors are capable of such things? Why, when hearing patently dubious claims, are we so gullible? Why do we not ask to see the police reports or news stories? Why, when someone tells us that such-and-such causes cancer, do we not ask for the source of this “information,” but dutifully forward it to everyone in our address book? It’s tempting to surmise that people just like to believe they are beset by dangers on all sides (otherwise why would they so willingly believe it?). With the Internet handy it’s often the work of just minutes to bust a hoax, and yet hardly a week goes by when I don’t find some heartfelt warning in my inbox, urging me to share it with my loved ones.

I think back to my teen years and the thrilling sensations I experienced when hearing about The Bloody Hook; among the feelings I relished the most were the ones relating to how safe I felt that my friends had shared it with me! We had each other’s backs! No crazy Hook Man was going to get me because my girlfriends were looking out for me! That feels awesome, and it’s worth having a crazy Hook Man on the loose. Maybe nameless teen angst needs a scapegoat, a boogeyman we can circle the wagons against.

But seriously. If we actually want to be safe, instead of just feeling safe, it’s up to us to be critical consumers of information. A feeling of security is pointless without actual security, and a false sense of danger can distort a secure life in truly harmful ways, not the least by trampling joy and freedom. Intellectual courage can help us dig for verification of the alarms and warnings that come our way. It can help us teach our kids what healthy skepticism is, and teach us to be better at risk assessment (e.g. air travel not statistically dangerous, driving without a seat belt statistically really dangerous). Intellectual courage can save us from the bloody hook.

“Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive.” Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

A fable from Aesop that has seen a lot of play over the centuries is the Ant and the Grasshopper. The story extols the industrious ant who spends the summer working and storing food, and also points out the improvidence of the grasshopper who fiddles and sings all summer long, ends up starving through the winter and knocking on the ant’s door for a hand-out.

Chances are, (if you are American) you’re a grasshopper. The U.S. personal savings rate is the lowest among developed nations. Why is that? And what’s it got to do with Lion’s Whiskers?

Here’s some information that may require some intellectual courage to process. 85% of Americans expect their kids to go to college, but 47% of American parents can’t afford that education for their kids. Many families do save for college (although not enough); many parents raid their retirement savings to pay for college (considered a bad idea indeed); and a great many expect to take financial aid and student loans when the time comes. Yet according to the College Savings Foundation, the cost of borrowing money for college v. the cost of saving for college is 7:1. Let me put that in another way. Let’s say you spend $10 per week now on saving for college. If you wait and borrow the money instead, it will cost you $70 per week to pay off. That’s a pretty impressive difference. $10 per week now or $10 per day later?

We know from psychology research that our cognitive biases (e.g. the tendency to discount information that contradicts our wishes or shows our previous decision-making to have been flawed) really mess up our ability to make decisions, especially decisions having to do with the long-range future. And when it comes to parenting, many of us live in “putting out the fire” mode instead of “fire prevention” mode. It’s hard to make long-term plans when you need to know how to get a colicky baby to sleep tonight, or you need to make decisions about which parental control software to install on the computer today so the kids don’t start downloading crazy stuff on Saturday night while the baby-sitter is busy texting friends. But the parenting industry thrives because of the “putting out the fire” mentality that so many parents live with. Fear is used as a marketing crowbar to pry money from our hands to throw on the fire. And yet the fact is, much of the time there really is no fire; we’re just conditioned to believe without question all the messages that tell us there is. If we don’t do this, buy that, register here NOW we’ll thwart our children’s hopes and dreams, damage their self-esteem, poison them, put them in mortal danger, expose them to creepy people and also maybe make them fat and stupid. Spending money to quiet those fears gives us a false sense of security, and allows us to to go back to the fun stuff, like spending the summer fiddling and singing. (Grasshopper).

Instead of being reactive to the fear messages, we can be proactive about real challenges that lie ahead. (Winter). We can walk out of the store (or the on-line mall) with our credit cards unswiped. Instead we can save those dollars for the long-term so that our children don’t leave college buried in loans. If we really want the best for our kids, it seems to me, we’d do better foregoing the latest, newest everything now, and give them the gift of education without crushing debt. (Ant).

For many people, spending money can be related to a lack of emotional courage, if buying something is motivated by boredom, escapism or loneliness; spending money may be related to a lack of social courage, if buying something is motivated by a desire to be trendy or ahead of the wave; spending money may be related to a lack of spiritual courage, if buying something is motivated by feelings of purposelessness and the need to fill a spiritual hole; it may be motivated by a lack of moral courage, if buying something is inspired by feelings of entitlement or egocentricity; it may be motivated by a lack of physical courage, if it is inspired by a false belief that buying something will make one look better, live longer, or lose belly fat fast.

According to statistics available on the National Financial Educators Council website, teens and young adults report feeling woefully unprepared to manage money – the mysteries of checkbook balancing, credit card interest rates, debt payments and budgeting are scary, confusing and intimidating. But children as young as five can start learning about money – if someone will teach them. It may be more convenient to go to the bank when the kids are at school, but for the most part they aren’t learning anything about money at school. They must learn it from us. They must see us actively making financial decisions and setting financial goals; they must see us basing our spending, our savings, and our charitable giving on those goals instead of on impulsiveness. Yes, itchy as it sounds, we must model being ants for them.

It’s way more fun to be the grasshopper. And it’s okay to be the grasshopper some of the time, but we must have the courage to be ants as well. Whether our children grow up as grasshoppers or ants may mean the difference between them moving back home after college or going out into the world as courageous and independent young people who know how to get through the winter.

If you spend a day at the museum with lots of old paintings, one of the easiest saints for children to recognize in sculpture and painting is St. Francis. A gentle monk surrounded by forest creatures is a benevolent and appealing image, and I suspect it mirrors the secret longing of so many children – talking with animals. This story of Francis, like many traditional tales, features danger in the form of a ferocious wolf.