Joy.
- Symi
- Jun 18
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 24
Tell me about a moment of joy in your life. Were you able to let it renew your heart, rekindle your ablity to live fully? When did you last laugh until your sides acehed? Do you dare to lose control and let the joy carry you?
I am ALL FOR these moments of impossible joy - whether they come in the course of an ordinary day or in the extraordinary ecstatic experience. There are some who would have us believe that we have to choose - warning us away from the ecstatic rush of feeling that comes in moments of real magic, admonishing us to focus only on the joy found in ordinary moments. Their warning is understandable. Obvz. Moments of mystical union can tempt us to spend our lives searching for those peak experiences, and leave us unable or unwilling to receive the same joy when it's offered in the simpler experiences, in the taste of a ripe mango eaten slowly, or in a moment of quiet stillness.
But, I am a greedy woman. I want it all.
I want the small daily joys. I want to celebrate born days, successes, and days well lived, and I want to experience ecstasy, the vision of wholeness that dissolves my boundaries. I am blessed, because I do have both.
I remember cooking a meal for a very special born day for my brother. You can tell it was special because I laid the table in the dining room and I'd set it with my 'blue willow' china - not really "good" china, but a different pattern and less chipped than what I used daily! I am in a last minute of frenzy before my family arrives, trying to get everything from kitchen to the table. Distracted, I survey the table one more time and hadn't noticed everyone had arrived. My brother, who's birthday it was, beamed. They all stood in the doorway watching me. I am flushed, damp tendrils of hair have escaped my hairpins and curl down my throat. My dress is wrinkled and clinging to me where it is moist with perspiration from working in the warm kitchen.
Suddenly, my bro comes in grinning and moving to me from the opposite side of the room. "Sym, this is amazing," he says and grabs my arm with his strong hand. His unexpected exuberance makes me beam with joy. He starts singing the wordless melody of the 'Blue Danube' waltz and starts dancing around the table pulling me with him as I half heartedly protest that the food will get cold. My hair comes completely undone and falls around my shoulders and I give up. We all now dance. My Mum, my brothers, my woofers, twirling around the food-laden table. Finally we stop, exhausted, and collapse, laughing, into our chairs. It doesn't matter that the food has cooled. We sit smiling, and quiet for a moment, catching our breath and looking at one another's shining faces.
Joy finds us and lifts us in ordinary moments like this, if we let it.
Joy is a choice. It does not deny what is hard in our lives. Joy finds us when we feel the elation that comes when we know that we belong - to another, to ourselves, to the world, to the Milky Way Galaxy that is SO much larger than ourselves!
When you share joy with me, you tell me what you belong to. The joy of dancing in the dining room shows me that at the end of the day, after all is done - efficiently or not - I belong to the people I love the most in this world. I taste the joy of belonging to. And it is ecstatic.
Why is it often so hard for us to choose joy, even in moments when there are no painful circumstances in our lives? Sometimes, I think we simply do not know how. So many of our rituals of celebration and relaxation involve moving away from being with what is - numbing out, if only a little, with drugs or alcohol. As one of my yoga students once said to me, "We don't seem to know very much about how to lighten up without numbimg out." Music and dance are obvious exceptions.
I want to cultivate ways of celebrating joy in my life, and I want to recognize and savour the moments of joy that come. I want to enjoy the FULL variety of pleasures life holds, even when some of those joys appear to others to be incompatible and contradictory.
A good friend with whom I speak regularly on the phone once said to me, "Never apologize for what you do well." And now, I don't. I take joy in sharing the gifts I have been given, I feel blessed by my abilities, and look for ways to doing things I will never do well. I play the guitar, very badly, without hope of playing well. I play because I love to participate in making music. I play because it helps me lighten up without numbing out, stops me taking myself too seriously, and reminds me that there is joy in what I do well and in what I do badly. Those I choose to be with intimately are those who can appreciate the joy of both.
And, I am careful not to participate, even by remaining silent, in another's efforts to diminish the enormity in our lives. A beautiful student of mine, a little jaded by the past and frightened for the future shrugged and told me today in a derisive singsong voice that she is at the 'I-want-to-spend-the-rest-of-my-life-with-you' stage of a new relationship. I whince, stop her and ask her not to do this - not to tear at the precious place where love is birthed, that magical time when all things seem possible. I ask her to share with me her joy, her excitement, her fear, her hope that love is possible. She begins to cry. Joy scares her more than pain. Pain is familiar. Joy breeds dangerous hope and the potential for disappointment.
Being with joy, means being willing to be stretched, to expand to hold it all. And this frightens us. We are often so frightened of the pain of disappointment that we often pick at what is new and hopeful, anticipating flaws or failures, robbing ourselves of the joy that lifts our spirits. If we have lived at all, we know there will be trials, that the bliss of new love will be changed and coloured by the practical details of life together.
The enemy of joy is the litany of "not good enough," that picks at what is or might be, finding the imperfections, real or imagined. I am good at this - my perfectionism can tear at what is imperfect but whole, until the whole is in pieces. Part of me runs towards disappointment in an effort to avoid the soreness of being sideswiped by an unanticipated let down. But to feel joy, we have to trust the moment and welcome it in its fullness for what it is. We have to be willing to acknowledge that we are often not in control - and to celebrate the good fortune in this. And we have to feel worthy of having joy in our lives.
Years ago, my Mum and I were talking about the high rate of divorce in our culture. "People," she said matter of factly, "expect too much these days."
"No," I replied with both a swiftness and a quiet sadness that surprised myself, "they don't expect enough."
We were both right ofcourse. We often do expect the happy-ever-after romance of the movies and discount the small, imperfect joys of daily living. But we also often expect too little joy in life and settle for less than our souls need to flourish. It's not that I expect to feel happy everyday. In fact, I value the elusive kernel of meaning, the often difficult unfolding of the larger story, more than I value the fleeting feelings of happiness.
But, life is very short and precious.
We can make any number of good choices to live meaningful, productive, loving lives. Surely the choices that bring us the most joy will be the easiest to sustain, will make it possible for us to contribute all that we are able. And this is not always about making the choices that bring the most immediate gratification.
Tell me about a joy in your life that came unexpectedly, a moment that you did not even know you were waiting for, that caught you off guard and made you smile.
I was made to dance around the dining room table with family I love as food gets cold. I belong to the stars in the night sky and on the mirrored surface of the lake - to the silence of the wilderness in darkness. I belong to the ideas that I love. I was made to study and learn and teach and write and love. I belong to all of this and much more - this is my joy. And it is limitless.
