Joy, beautiful joy. I’m talking pure, uninhibited, rainbows-shooting-out-of-your-body-holes joy. The subject has been on my mind lately and, I guess you could say, I’m on a special mission to start tracking it down. I want to observe joy in its natural habitat and then plot how I can begin trapping it. It’s survival, really. It’s to feed my soul.
When my kids are swept up in joy, I can taste it in the air they’re exhaling. I can feel the temperature go up as the joy radiates off of their smiling faces and vibrating bellies, shaking with those good, deep giggles. It is a tangible experience, my daughters swept up in joy.
With me, it’s more discreet. I have to pick up the boulders and kick the dirt around a little bit to uncover the joy. It’s there, no doubt. It just doesn’t shine off of me like a polished nickel in the sun, the way it does from my girls. Joy whispers at my heart, only shouting when the cost of missing it is too great.
And honestly, I think a lot of us are missing it. According to the Harris Poll, which included responses from 2,202 Americans ages 18 and older, only 33% of Americans surveyed said they were happy, the beautiful byproduct of joy. In 2016, just 31% of Americans reported the same. I mean, we’re improving, but a lousy 33%? Math isn’t necessarily my jam, but I’m pretty sure that means that if 10 of us were standing in a room together, only two of us and a pregnant lady would claim to be happy. We’re experiencing a torrential downpour of apathy and a desperate joy drought, and I can’t help but complain about the weather.
For the sake of research, I folded up a piece of scrap paper and put it in my purse. I decided to make note of all of the moments I felt joy during the week. Real talk: I averaged about four instances of joy a day, but approximately 40% of those tallies could be attributed to food and 10% to professional wins. Is food a source of joy? Perhaps. But it feels more like something that should go under the pleasure category, which, in my mind, is tied up to the senses a bit tighter than joy.
I wanted to expand my sample size, so I called my brother, Matt, on my drive over to visit my mom, who was recovering from back surgery in the hospital. “How often do you experience joy in a day?” I asked him. “Can I give you a negative number?” he snapped back, before quickly amending his answer to “once”.
Minutes later, I settled into a plastic recliner next to Mom’s bed and asked her the same question. “I don’t think I do feel joy everyday,” she answered. “It really depends on how much I’m around my kids and my grandkids. I mean, I talk to people on the phone at work all day, and they’re so nice, but I don’t feel, like, a burst of joy.”
Later, when Matt came up to the hospital, the three of us picked the conversation back up. Having chewed on the question a bit, my brother decided that he has more joy in his life than he initially thought. His kids bring him joy. His clients bring him joy. And then, because what else does family do when one of them is healing, the three of us filled up the modest space with laughter and stories for a few hours. After my brother left, I put another tally on my scrap of paper, thus debunking the theory that joy, like fortune or luck, alludes those who speak its name out loud. Just talking about joy had been the spark to its flames.
By dawn the next day, I was getting downright greedy. I never played, but for once I could relate to all those crazies who went on that Pokemon binge a few years back. I’d gamified instances of joy, and now I wanted more and more and more of it. I wanted more smiles, more laugh tears, more tallies. Hi, my name is Courtney, and while I’d describe myself as generally happy, I am a self-proclaimed joy junkie. The scribbled moments on my list, the treasures under the boulders, the whispers inside me, there just aren’t enough of them.
There’s a solution to everything and inviting strategy into the pursuit certainly lends a certain sophistication to the quest. Remembering there’s a reason I read, I went back through some of my voice memos from my favorite authors and grabbed a trifecta of philosophies on joy. Here’s how the gurus say we can tap into a goldmine of joy.
We can choose it.
Writer Gabrielle Bernstein says that “happiness is a choice I make.” To me, joy, by nature, feels more organic. I think of it like a gift from the universe and all her conspiring forces. Moments of joy certainly spawn happiness, and so I might amend Gabby’s statement here to say that choosing to seek out and celebrate joy is a choice. Choosing to slow down enough to spot and let the joy sink in is a choice. Choosing to let joy be kindling for your happiness is a choice.
One of the items on my list was overhearing an exchange between JoJo (my oldest) and Sloppy Joan (my youngest) getting ready for school. SJ is going through a phase where she wants her sisters to help her get dressed, rather than her flustered, bossy mother. On this morning, she’d picked her oldest sibling to help her make sure the tags were in the back. From down the hall, I looked on as my JoJo, who often wrestles with patience herself, sweetly guide her sister’s tooties into her socks, one at a time. Then her undies, then her shorts, then her shirt, coaching her to pull arms through and rewarding her with kind words as the process progressed.
On any given weekday morning, I am doing five things at once, lecturing being the most consistent of those tasks. “Brush your teeth. Grab a sweatshirt. Turn the light off. Put the clothes in the hamper. Go get underwear. Find your shoes. Tie your shoes. Hurry up and eat.” But because my joy receptors were engaged, on that morning, I stopped. I chose to see joy. And the interesting thing is, if I were a betting woman, I’d put all my money down that there is a moment just like that moment hidden in the midst of most chaotic mornings.
Slowing down for joy is a choice. Happiness is a choice.
We can stop being so damn judgy.
A few months back I listened to “The Book of Joy” by Archbishop Desmund Tutu and the Dalai Lama. There was a whole lotta zen in that bad boy, but one of my favorite points they made was about the relationship between love and joy.
According to the enlightened pair, most humans are prone to practice biased love. We love our kids, our families, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors. But beyond that, we struggle to empathize and open our hearts. We operate as if there’s a limited capacity for love. But when we stop thinking about ourselves and the people in our inner circle exclusively, we can find joy for humanity.
They went on to explain that self-involved thinking leads to anger and depression. It’s a script we’ve all read. “Why did I do that? Why didn’t they pick me? Why did I eat that? I’m such a failure.” How is joy supposed to penetrate all of that negative noise? But thinking of others, shifts us toward compassion, and it’s really hard to be an unhappy asshole when you’re acting from a place of compassion.
As a writer, I get to tell a lot of stories. Nothing brings me more joy than when the words take shape on the screen and I’m able to capture the bravery or strength or character of another human being. Exchanging stories under the umbrella of this great big world is a powerful connector. Feeling connected encourages the tendency toward compassion, and compassion breeds joy.
Stop being so stingy with your love.
We can be grateful for it.
This whole thing started for me because I just finished Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness.” In it, she writes, “Joy is probably the most vulnerable emotion we experience. We’re afraid if we allow ourselves to feel it, we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment. That’s why in moments of real joy, many of us dress rehearse tragedy. We see our child leave for prom and all we can think is, car crash. We get excited about an upcoming vacation and we start thinking hurricane. We try to beat our vulnerability to the punch by imagining the worst or by feeling nothing in hopes the other shoe will drop. I call it foreboding joy.”
This was the passage. It was the switch that turned me on and got me thinking about how many times joy has shown up at my front door and I either didn’t answer or I turned it away. Maybe I turned it away because it scared me, or because I was worried about what others would think if I invited it in, or because I was too freaking busy to hear the bell.
I think of joy as a God wink. A gift. But after talking to others and writing it down and searching within myself, it also feels like a rarity. Like, of all of the moments in a day, the ones that bring joy are too often the exception. But reading Brene’s work makes me wonder if we’re all just scared to open ourselves up and let more of it in.
People are constantly telling me, “Don’t blink, your kids will be gone before you know it,” and “Enjoy it. It all goes so fast.” And while I know these points to be true, they also fuel my own foreboding joy. As soon as I tune into a happy moment, I instantly try to wrap my arms around it and squeeze it into my soul and my forever memory. I suffocate it. Like a fart in a tornado, I want to hold onto it, but it’s impossible. The presence of joy makes me simultaneously mourn its expiration. And how could it not, when every person and every message around you warns of how fleeting it is?
So give me a solution, Brene.
Gratitude, she says. The fastest way to access joy and trap it for a bit is through an attitude of gratitude. Carving out time to count your blessings, the big ones and the small ones, can extend the high. It can be like living the moment all over again.
I’ve tried to make meditation part of my daily routine for years, with extremely mild success. But typically, when I workout in the mornings I have about 5 minutes where I can sit in silence. No one else is awake in the house and it’s only me, my thoughts and the settling walls. Earlier this week, during one of these brief sittings, I was given the gift of reflection. When I closed my eyes, I saw my family running through a beautiful forest. I could hear their laughter and I could see their toothless grins and I felt a peace I hadn’t felt in days. I got quiet enough that I could visit with gratitude, and in return, she brought her best friend joy. And I was so thankful because guests like that don’t show up every day.
The truth is, most of us aren’t short on blessings. We’re short on fingers and toes on which to count them. Right now, I’m sitting at my dining room table. An hour ago I kissed my oldest daughters and put them on the school bus. I kissed my husband. I kissed my baby, butter from her toast still salty on her tiny lips. The sunlight is warming my hands and steaming in between the swaying branches on the trees behind our fence. My coffee is just strong enough. I’m typing the final words of a post I’ve been coming back to for days.
I am happy.
In this moment, I have joy. And I hope you do, too.