Hardwired for Joy
“In a seemingly odd, but lovely pairing, joy and grief go hand in hand. One’s ability to feel the ranges and valleys of grief, the trembles of the soul that move through currents of sadness, means that one is also more able to enjoy great joy.”
Earlier this week I was on the phone with a friend, feeling a deep sadness as she shared some of the challenges she has been facing this last month. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a slight movement in the backyard. At least ten bushtits were hanging on the wire case filled with suet, while another 25 to 30 sat patiently on a branch, waiting their turn. At that precise moment, I realized I was feeling both sadness and profound joy. I’m thinking you may also be familiar with these mixed emotions, that odd, lovely pairing of joy and grief, walking hand in hand.
Photo by Greg Gillson, The Cornell Lab
My journey with joy goes back to my 30’s, when I bought the book Finding Joy: 101 Ways to Free Your Spirit by Charlotte Kasl. I was desperately seeking joy. At the time, I thought joy and happiness walked hand in hand; if I could find joy, I would be happy. I was wrong. Kasl, a Quaker psychotherapist, whose writings have brought me much comfort over the years, wrote that when we have the ability to access joy, we are more capable of staying centred in the midst of life’s difficulties. Like me, she had struggled with depression and hopelessness in her teens and twenties. Writing about joy helped her discover that a sense of inner joy anchored her life. Reading her book and being intentional in opening myself to joy, my life began to feel more grounded.
At the beginning of this pandemic, I chose five words to see me through this journey – hope, kindness, calm, support, and brave – not joy. Yet it is joy that has carried me through the year. Every night, as I reflect back with gratitude on the day, I realize joy had found me.
I listened to a Reboot podcast with Ingrid Fetell-Lee, author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness this week. Her TED talk “Where Joy Hides and How to Find It” has been viewed more than 17 million times.
Fetell-Lee confirmed what I had learned in my 30’s, happiness and joy are not the same. Happiness is a broad evaluation of how you feel about your life over time. Whereas joy is an emotion, an intense momentary experience of positive emotion. Joy is about feeling good in the moment. Right now.
In the podcast Fetell-Lee shares that, “you can have moments of bittersweetness, you can have moments of joy that feel poignant, that feel powerful within a crisis, just as you can have disappointments within an incredibly happy time, and those two things exist in parallel.” She continues that there are joys specific to hard times. You do not discover them until you are in them. There is an intense recognition of joy when we are in despair. Joy lands with more poignancy during difficult times.
I take comfort in knowing that I can feel intense joy even when I am in despair. Joy balances the darkness and opens my world to possibility.
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding, that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk, was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten; that the world is meant to be celebrated.
– Terry Tempest Williams