Finding Joy
Sometimes, when life is really hard, happiness feels impossible. But something that is always possible, no matter what is happening, is the experience of joy. Aiming at joy, especially in hard times, is a solace, a game-changer, a life-saver, and a balm for suffering.
The differences between happiness and joy
Something kind of funny happens when someone (like, for example, a psychologist conducting a study on happiness) asks you if you are happy.
Most people tend to answer, not with a precise summary of their lifetime happiness levels, but instead, with a cognitive evaluation of their life. You have a mental bar for what ‘happiness’ looks like to you, and when you’re asked this question, you look at how your current life is measuring up to this bar, whether it’s higher or lower, and how much higher or lower. Then you label it with a number.
Try it yourself! Ask yourself, “How happy am I, on a scale of 1-10?” and then watch how your mind leaps into action to measure against the bar. It probably will quickly scan back over the past few days, tally up how that experience aligns with your personal definition of happiness, and then give you the number, a judgment.
Joy is not a judgment; it’s a feeling, one that we all know intuitively. Like all feelings, it manifests differently for each of us, but it is usually found in the same places: in play, in connection, in awe, in worship, in giving, in growing.
You don’t have to ask yourself if you’re feeling joy. You don’t evaluate joy; you know joy. You know joy because it springs from the deepest part of you, your true humanity, your natural state as a loving being. Joy arises when you let your barriers down and allow yourself to be your true self, or when your true self pushes through your barriers because it is just so compelled by something. Babies and puppies are joyful because they have no rules for themselves and no rules imposed upon them.
Many of us think that we can find joy only in the big moments of life: the marriage proposal, the birth of a child, the winning basket. But joy is more reliably found in the small daily moments that we often take for granted.
Joy focuses you outwardly
When we think about happiness as this bar that we hold up for ourselves, it becomes clear that this pursuit of happiness is pretty self-centered: it’s all about fulfilling your personal needs and reducing your pains to meet the bar.
Only good things help you to meet the bar, so everything out of our control and everything painful and everything hard becomes the enemy, to be shunned at all costs.
Joy is the opposite. Joy is connection.
Joy is about others. Joy comes from stripping off your armor and standing vulnerable and open to the world, engaging with it deeply and feeling it fully, without expectation but with courage. Joy is about helping other people to put down their bars.
Because joy is connection, it brings you power: it allows you to not only be aware of and acknowledge suffering, but sometimes, to even run at it.
Joy is the essence of being human. And because of that…
Joy can exist in times of deep suffering
The traditional concept of happiness fails us when bad things happen. And bad things do happen in life.
When they do, we must turn to something else. In the hardest of moments, joy is still possible. Joy is able to co-exist with suffering, with fear, with loss, with the awareness that we have an utter lack of control over our lives.
Joy and suffering can coexist because they are inextricably intertwined.
Joy is only possible when we put ourselves at risk of suffering. In order for any good thing to happen in our lives, we must choose to make ourselves vulnerable to an infinite number of bad, scary, or upsetting possibilities. We must face the possibility of suffering in order to ensure the birth of joy. For example:
To love another means to live with the awareness that their love can be taken away from you at any single moment.
To dream of a better life means to embrace the fear of failure, the anticipation of laughter, the inevitable risks.
To create something from your inner talents is to put your heart out to the world for judgment.
To seek to grow is to know that you will flail, fail, and feel uncomfortable along the way.
To live a good life, you have to make yourself vulnerable to things that are outside of your control, to trust in the world and in others, and to acknowledge the fragility of your state of being - and to connect anyways, because joy is worth it.
How to protect your joy
Sometimes, what gets in the way of joy is the happiness bar rearing its’ head: instead of immersing yourself in the moment of connection, you remind yourself of other things you should be doing, make comparisons between yourself and other people, or talk unkindly to yourself.
This is further amplified by the relentless treadmill of modern life that seems expressly designed to limit joy - the sense that all of life must be productive and purposeful, that we should move efficiently from one task to another, and that we should keep ourselves closed away in our separate rooms. Joy arises in the pause, in the extra five seconds of connection, in the honest disclosure to another.
How to choose more joy
The first step is to be aware of the possibility of joy in every moment. You can do that by choosing to connect, at any time, with yourself, with other people, with nature, and with whatever is happening around you. Build space into your day for joy to arise.
I’ve identified seven pathways to joy — look at this list and try to find a few ways to fulfill one of them today:
The joy of our senses: the taste of food, the sound of music, the feeling of touch, the sight of beauty
The joy of growth: focusing hard to learn something, listening hard to give, or putting a good day’s work in
The joy of awe: being connected to things so big that we feel small, like family, community, country, nature, and faith
The joy of relationship: being seen, seeing others
The joy of love: being helped and helping, holding and being held
The joy of being you: taking what you’re great at and offering it up to others
Another profound strategy is learning to catch the joy of others. When you see people enjoying themselves, let yourself feel their emotions, and be moved by them. Smile at babies and dogs and let them make you laugh and smile and coo. It feels that good for a reason!
Listen to the voice inside of you that asks for joy, that has a will for it, no matter how hard this moment might be for you. By asking for joy, know that you are part of something much greater than this challenging moment.