Joy is a slippery phenomenon to capture in words, to pin it down well enough to trace its silhouette in unambiguous black and white. Joy, most naturally, wriggles about like a toddler resisting the indecency of nap time. It leapfrogs from one unsuspecting soul to another. Its spirit isn’t meant to sit still.
We intuitively recognize the experience of joy within ourselves and in others. There is even growing scientific evidence to confirm the widely held opinion that animals, too, experience joy. As universal as it might be, however, joy is difficult to define. We acknowledge that it is something apart from happiness, and also more fleeting. We recognize that joy often comes more easily and frequently for children than for seasoned adults. We are well acquainted with the common sources of joy, yet there is no guarantee that proximity to a source will result in a joyful experience.
Seeking to understand the essence of joy is to embrace all things elusive and ephemeral, but the reward is a more intimate and playful relationship with life as it unfolds from one moment to the next. In my experience, this is what dictionary definitions fail to communicate about joy. Webster’s may adequately capture the letter of the law, so to speak, but it falls utterly short of the spirit. Joy is far more than a lighthearted diversion; it is vital. It serves a meaningful purpose. Joy tempers the accumulated heaviness of the human experience and renews the soul. It is an antidote to cynicism and jadedness.
Joy makes it possible to recommit to our faith in the value of life and resume the hard work of being alive, despite inevitable suffering.
So then, where do we begin? How do we attempt to tease out a masterful understanding of joy?
We start with what we know, and we know joy when we feel it.
Joy is, among other things, a sensation – a recognizable experience felt in the body. It is expansive and uplifting. It animates us, welling up from within, and erupts into the world through laughter, an exclamation of glee, or clapping hands. We might even notice a flush of the cheeks or a quickened heart rate as joy transcends the emotional realm and takes root in the physical.
The strength with which joy arrives in the body points to an important truth buried in the experience. It reveals that the body’s response is more than a mere expression of a good time. At the peak of a joyful moment, we take deeper breaths, the lungs and rib cage expand, we smile automatically, we powerfully expel air through laughter, and the pupils of our eyes dilate. These are well documented physical indications of released tension and stress. Joy liberates us. And importantly, this feeling of liberation is equally present in both the physical and emotional realms.
Take a moment to recall your most recent encounter with joy. What was the context? What thoughts and feelings were at the forefront of your mind as you experienced it? What claimed the focus of your attention in the moments and hours after joy had come and gone?
Perhaps in your reflection, you noticed one of joy’s most important gifts: as we live it, there is no room to experience worry. It disarms us by halting our incessant inner dialogue. It feels like a welcome breeze that refreshes any staleness of spirit. The mental slate is wiped clean. It shifts our focus to the present moment and suspends the weight of our burdens. Joy releases us from the grip of anxiety and fear, even if only temporarily, by softening our expectations of the present and evaporating the minutia of daily agendas.
How extraordinary it is that joy – this playful, effervescent human experience – has the power to unclench even the most rigid inner grip. Its effects are as potent as many standard pain relievers, though admittedly short-lived. Even in its most subdued manifestations, this vibrant energy eschews stasis. Joy and permanence are not compatible.
Like many temporary things, the experience of joy is all the more precious precisely because of its unpredictability and brevity. Joy lives and breathes in the present moment. It demands that we savor it as it happens. Yet, as much as we intuitively understand that joy is impossible to force into being on command, many self-proclaimed joyful people, as well as scores of long-time practitioners of Buddhism, anecdotally claim that an attitude of joy can be cultivated. This is not to suggest that joy can be dialed up on demand. Instead, they seem to suggest that we can nurture within ourselves an attractive environment in which joy is most likely to appear.
In recent years, as I have committed to pursuing more joy in my life, my own personal experience seems to support this notion.
Being a deeply empathetic person, I’ve historically gravitated to the heavy subjects of sadness, depression and suffering. Even as a young person, I had the capacity to recognize and hold the pain of others without personal discomfort, and it is a capacity I treasure to this day. It wasn’t until I met and fell in love with a chronically joyful person, however, that I began to recognize the power of joy and just how much I craved more of it in my life. I started observing joy more closely. I noticed trends in myself that seemed to echo the experience of joy in others. As I chose to prioritize certain things, joy became a more frequent experience in my life. I have seen for myself that we do indeed have some measure of agency when it comes to joy. What a blessing it is to discover that we can put our thumb on the joy scale, rather than wait passively for joy to fall into our lap!
For my part, I’ve come to rely upon a handful of methods for inviting more joy into my life. I offer my list here in the hopes that it might help you nurture your own relationship with joy along with a promise to explore this list most thoroughly in a future piece.
Invitations to Joy: Play, Generosity, Nature, Gratitude, Accomplishment* & Authenticity.
*As someone who constantly preaches against the cult of productivity, I add this to my list with some reticence, but with respect for the truth of it. Many things that are difficult to accomplish, hard-earned and meaningful in some way or another, things that require long-term investment and delayed gratification, are worth celebrating. Quite often in my experience, and the experience of many others, joy comes to the party.
My ultimate point is this: Joy is not simply a one-sided, buzzy emotional nutrient. It is a layered human experience that contains great wisdom and insight about living well. Joy visits us when we are at our human best – a messenger of sorts, inviting us to step more deeply into our better qualities. Not only does it lift our spirit and influence our physiology in significant ways, it reminds us that our time here is short and that presence is the way to experience the gift of the time we do have most fully.