"To make mistakes is human. To stumble is commonplace. To be able to laugh at yourself is maturity."

Armed with these words by American writer William Arthur Ward, I am ready to face a new day of doing more stupid things that will make me laugh at myself. Perhaps I will open the pantry door looking for a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. On the way home, I will drive past my house because I'm singing a song in my head from back in the '60s by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Then, I might just roast a chicken for dinner that will sit in the oven a half-hour before I discover I never turned the heat on.An important feature of getting older, (and there aren't too many) is that I can choose to laugh at myself. When I was younger, the same stupid things I do today would have caused me to be angry and even self-destructive."Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat. … Never take yourself too seriously."Author Og Mandino reminds me that what we believe to be overwhelming failure is usually not of that magnitude. Divorce, financial debt and loss of employment are nothing to laugh about, yet after enough time has passed and we recover from such calamities, we can actually find reasons to laugh at our failures.Here's a chuckle about a divorce. "When we married, she must have come with a book about how to understand her. I never read it. I'm sure there would be too many pages before I got bored anyway. To my surprise, she closed the book on me and moved on."Here's a before and after ha about debt. "I couldn't close my wallet because a stack of credit cards were jammed inside. When I finally got rid of most of the plastic, I felt I had lost five pounds of stress from my body and five pounds of weight from my wallet. Maybe now I can start a dump-your-debt diet craze!"And when the job's a joke:"Was I thinking that I could pack cardboard boxes on an assembly line every day for 30 years? He did me a favor when he let me go and saved me from going to the nuthouse!""If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you." Comedian Groucho Marx would have never stopped laughing at us. Don't we all do something stupid in front of others? We're embarrassed. They laugh at us, which makes us feel worse, unless of course we laugh along with them.Thinking it was wide open. I once walked face-first into a large glass door in a shopping mall. A group of nearby kids laughed at me. I threw them an angry stare and hurried in to the store with a bruise on my nose. If I did the same thing today, I'd probably laugh and say something out loud like, "I've got to find out what kind of glass cleaner this place uses!""I used to take myself very seriously. Now it's all just funny. You gotta laugh at yourself. You know, most of the time when something's a big deal for us, it's only become a big deal in the space between our ears," said Gillian Anderson, a television and theater actress.I recall when the year 2000 was about to come onto the calendar and everyone seemed to be panicking that massive computer shutdowns would paralyze the whole world. A computer expert I knew was building a bunker in his basement with stockpiles of food, water and weapons to prepare for Armageddon.Instead of thinking with common sense, I have to admit I was frightened enough to buy a truck full of canned goods to prepare for the "Y2K" disaster.That New Year's Eve I held my breath at the stroke of midnight, expecting the world to go dark and time on the clocks would forever stand still. Five minutes later I was on my third glass of champagne and I had everyone in the room laughing about the computer expert's survival shelter in Jim Thorpe."Stupid is as stupid does," said Forrest Gump. When intelligent people do stupid things, well, they are stupid.It would be me who would find and eat a can of peas that was left over in the basement from my "Y2K" stash. I'll laugh like hell at myself when my wife says the peas expired in March 2000. That's if I don't die from food poisoning first.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com.