Why does the meeting of another person's gaze so often cause us to laugh? . . . We laugh because we're so happy to have finally found a real friend, someone with whom we can express this deepest part of our nature, someone to whom we can show our original face, the pure and guileless innocence of being that existed before we had to learn to don our masks and tough it out in the world in order to lay claim to our own personal bit of space and territory.
— Will Johnson, Rumi's Four Essential Practices