Shout Cry Laugh

Shout Cry Laugh.

This is not the title of the sequel to the book Eat Pray Love I have been reading. Rather, it is Jo Wilfried Tsonga’s reaction to his heartbreaking five-set loss to Novak Djokovic, the world no.1 tennis player, in this year’s French Open. He somehow failed to convert four match points and let Djokovic off the hook. Talking about his emotions in the final set, he said:

"Well, it was a bit of everything. I was tired; I was frustrated; I was disappointed. You get all kinds of feelings going through your mind. You want to break your racquet. You want to shout. You want to cry. You want to laugh and say, 'Oh, come on, that's a joke.' How could I lose this match?"

The following extract is from the book Eat Pray Love:

"It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion - joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing."

It seems to be a fitting description of Tsonga's situation.