Kind of weird. Nobody talks about joy, do they? It didn’t seem all that profound a statement, and I was surprised that my mind kept coming back to it. Until that moment I didn’t think of joy as something you take anyway! I thought joy happens to you on special occasions, or when you least expect it. I didn’t know I was getting ready to discover the lost secret about joy.
I started out to study joy in all innocence, not expecting anything earthshaking. And yet, I thought, why wouldn’t it be as true for joy as it is for honesty and courage? That you personally have to do them? You don’t wait around for honesty and courage to appear. You return the money when you get too much change. When confronted by your accusers, you don’t lie, you stand there with nothing but your small pitiful truth in your hand.
We take courage, we take satisfaction as an act of will. Why don’t we take joy? Is it because we’re not grateful? I didn’t think so. Anyway, being grateful for things is not exactly the same as being joyful, is it? Being grateful for liberty is not the same thing as the lump in your throat when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Perhaps at that moment, we are taking joy in our country, without realizing we are doing it. I felt a strange excitement. Like I was getting close to something really important.
Could we learn, I asked myself, to take joy on purpose, whenever we want to, instead of just letting it happen by accident? I felt like an entomologist with my pin poised over an elusive butterfly. For starters, who better to study than myself?
Next morning, my husband asked me to get something out on the patio. I stopped myself midway in my task, and asked myself, why wasn’t I, right this second, (if we are going to study ourselves, it’s best to go second by second) taking joy in the scent of jasmine, the soft breeze blowing the leaves about on this beautiful Southern California day.
My immediate excuse was that I was in a hurry to get something for my husband. And I was still in my bathrobe, wasn’t dressed yet, hadn’t fed the dogs, or the cats, so it wasn’t the right time. That was an eye-opener. Do I put off joy until the “right time,” until I’m “all finished?” Am I ever “all finished?
Wow! It all started to make sense. If we don’t take charge, leadership doesn’t happen. If we don’t take care, safety isn’t there. If we don’t take courage, courage doesn’t appear. But, if we can exercise leadership, safety, and courage. Why can’t we exercise joy? Because joy is a feeling? But we take disappointment all the time. We take offense.
After dressing, I cut some roses. I like flowers in the house. But liking flowers in the house, I suddenly realized, is not real joy, is it? Even being grateful for flowers is not joy. Even taking satisfaction in the fact that you picked the roses, and brought them in the house, and they looked real nice is not the same thing as joy. I was getting closer and closer to the truth, even though I didn’t know it.
Why don’t I take joy in these flowers, I thought? So I made a decision, then and there, with rose basket in hand, to take joy in these flowers, in this day, in this room I stood in.
Of course I didn’t know if it would work. But I determined to stand there, and allow it somehow, to give a pure act of attention to the roses, not knowing at all how to do it. I took a deep breath, let my shoulders fall, put myself on pause, stood still and offered up my whole self to the roses. I just went belly up to the roses. It was at that moment the great secret revealed itself.
There was complete silence. Time seemed to stop as well. Something had changed. I felt something definitely more essential about the flowers than just liking them. It was more connected. Something rose up inside me. I would describe it as a kind of expansive sun-rise of the heart. It was like love, even though it wasn’t exactly head-over-heels exciting love. But then this was my first attempt. I was surprised it worked at all.
I was amazed, actually, that one could take joy instead of waiting for joy to make it’s one-way-communication, and haphazard appearance. I am convinced that taking joy is a lost secret. That taking joy is a latent human capacity. We don’t have joy whenever we want it because we are moving too fast, and have forgotten how to take it.
I succeeded in exercising joy the very first time I tried. It won’t get me a Nobel Prize. But I have tried it since, again, and again. The really strange thing is that I found I could do it anytime, even when I was depressed. That shocked me more than anything else–that you can take joy even when you’re depressed. And you can experience what I can only describe as a momentary bliss. It also makes you doubt the reality of depression that can be so easily interrupted by another choice. Interesting.
I can take joy anytime I want. Who knew? If I slow down, just stop my whole life for a minute, and focused completely on some small thing outside of myself, just went belly-up, and surrendered my whole self to it, I could actually take joy in it. And if I can do it, anybody can do it. You can do it. Joy is humanity’s lost secret, but anyone can reclaim it.
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