We are so poorly equipped to grasp what it’s all about! Our five senses are very limited windows on reality outside ourselves; it’s a sure bet that they transmit only a fraction of what’s out there. And for interpreting what we do perceive, we’re stuck with pretty low-grade brains. But we struggle on. All our huffing and puffing probably endears us to God. But, viewed from outside and beyond, it all must look pretty funny, too. No wonder He laughs.

The brightest among us knit their brows and then declaim philosophies, theologies, ideologies _ road maps for human meaning and happiness. Disciples, hungry for sureness, fervently embrace them.

They paint banners, make flags, write treatises, scriptures, manifestos. And then comes the bad part. The zealous disciples often attack those who disagree with them. People get killed. Lots of them.

Meanwhile, we ordinary, dimmer types act out small-scale models of all that in our individual lives. We set fuzzy rules of how we ought to live, what will make us happy. Then we get to work. We labor toward goals, clashing with others just like those zealous followers of philosophers and theologians and political master planners. Luckily, down at our level, much less blood gets spilled.

We little guys continue to puzzle and posture right to the edge of the grave, though many do get an insight in their later years. The credit doesn’t belong to them.

The cause is their waning energies, plus the aches, pains, and chronic complaints of aging. In these individuals, in spite of themselves, the truth asserts itself: Life, whatever goals we feverishly pursue, ends in limitation and death.

That’s not news, of course; we knew it in theory. But now we’re living it.

And if we’re lucky, we catch a sidelong glimpse of our own smallness. We realize that we’ve been jokesters all our days, but we’ve been pulling the joke on ourselves.

"Oh, yeah!" we finally say. "I get it! There’s a lot less to me than meets the eye!" (Or, better, "the I.") And that’s when we join God in the laughter.

That insight just may be the vaunted "wisdom of old age." I’ll let you know if it ever kicks in for me. But I think I see glints of it in the jokes I now enjoy most. They’re the ones about getting old and making do with it.

These jokes, like all good ones, have endings that surprise and delight. It’s that combination that makes us exclaim, "Hey, I want to remember that one!" The delight is always some revelation about us, all of us. Here are two favorites of mine. I told you the first one some years ago. The second I only recently heard, and from a woman near 90.

In the first joke, three elderly women, all widows, are sharing a house and also trying to help one another with failing memories. After supper one evening, one of them rises from the table. "I think I’ll go upstairs," she says, "and take a bath."

She fills the tub and then, one hand pressed against the wall for balance, carefully steps into the tub. But, with one foot in and the other still on the floor, she pauses, dismayed. "Oh, dear," she says aloud, "was I getting into the tub or out of it?"

The other two hear her, and a second woman pushes back her chair. "I’ll go up and help," she says. Halfway up the stairs, she pauses on the landing to catch her breath. Then confusion clouds her face. "Oh, my," she says, "was I going upstairs or down?"

Back at the table, the third woman smiles sadly and shakes her head. "Well," she says, "at least I’m not that bad yet, knock on wood." Then she looks quickly to the right and left. "Is that someone at the front door or the back?"

A small surprise for us at the end of that one, and ironic delight in recognizing what probably lies ahead.

The second joke has a woman sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. The door to the hall opens, and an ancient man enters. He’s bent almost double and, with the aid of a cane, he shuffles slowly across the waiting room. A nurse jumps up and opens the door to the doctor’s office. The man shuffles in.

Five minutes later, the old man emerges. Now standing almost upright, he starts toward the outside door. The seated woman is amazed. "Good heavens! What did the doctor do for you?" The old man pauses and looks back at her. "He gave me a longer cane."

Both of those jokes give us older types a chance to laugh at our place in the human comedy. But wait. Here’s a third one.

It’s about a dying man who hasn’t caught on to the joke. He hasn’t grasped that, at the end, our foolish competing makes no sense at all. The man in this joke is still plotting when he ought to be laughing with God. A rabbi friend shared it with me years ago:

Old Aaron, a devout Orthodox Jew, is lying on his deathbed. He calls his wife to his side. "Sarah," he whispers hoarsely, "I am about to die. Go call the priest. I am going to convert."

Sarah is aghast. "Aaron! For 85 years you’ve been a loyal servant of the Law. Why, at the end, would you want to become a Christian?"

Aaron fixes his rheumy eyes on her. "Better that one of them die," he rasps, "than one of us."

I’ll bet that one strikes God as funny.

Read about Jim Atwell’s new book, "From Fly Creek _ Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" at JimAtwell.com).