Where do you find joy?
One aspect of joy often seems to be that it includes an element of surprise. We weren't expecting it and...it happened. Perhaps, this is common when we have given up hope about something and then it happens and what we feel is a sudden kind of...joy. What we had hoped for did happen after all. Or, maybe it is a reflection of what we feel when something even better than we hoped for...happens.
But, while this seems like a fairly accurate description of how we often experience joy, I'm not sure it is the only way we do...or could.
What if joy is something we need to seek out? Like, perhaps, we don't have to leave it exclusively to surprise.
Like with many things, it seems that how we have arranged and live our lives significantly impacts the quality of our existence. If we do things that are harmful (to ourselves or whoever or whatever is around us), we reduce our capacity to experience what is good. Likewise, when put or keep ourselves in a position to experience what is good, we often do so. There seems to be a spiral-effect involved, in either direction.
Joy, it would seem to me, operates consistently with this dynamic. If I put myself in contexts where good things can happen, the opportunity for me to experience joy goes up. The opposite also seems true.
We often think that things like joy should be constant and over-the-top. But, few things are really like either of those. More often, it seems, the best things live among the smallest and (seemingly) most insignificant things in life. And, perhaps, they are found most by the way we dwell with those kinds of things.
And, so, I'm thinking that joy is among the wonderfully inconspicuous things that we find when we're most in a position to notice them. Not (at least too often) when we're in a hurry, rushing everywhere, or when we're trying to manage our stress with the many harmful things our society offers us to avoid them. Perhaps, it is when we commit ourselves to simple ways of living, making enough room to discover something already around us that is good for us, that we find valuable things...like joy.
Where do you find joy?
