Joy

I have a friend called Joy, and I like to imagine that her parents were so overjoyed at her birth that they chose to call her that. The name vibrates with such lovely happiness.

Joy is a word for those moments that send us beyond time, above the present, into another place.

I suppose alcohol and drugs are ways to find a joyful feeling. And yet we can’t go there; we can’t go into hysterical oblivion to avoid our real lives. We have to live here and now, without drugs. Joy is there, I think, waiting like a friend, a mysterious friend.

Because I can get crabby, sometimes I find myself annoyed with spiritual folks who can go beyond the present to experience joy in a kind of transcendence. I’m not one who can go there. I’m stuck here with my everyday stuff. When the present is boring or uncomfortable, here we are, charged with waiting, searching for that joy in the place we find ourselves — in the Arizona landscape, in moments of amazing surprise, or in the presence of people who lift our spirits.

The present is the place we live, and sometimes it’s hard to find joy in it, to appreciate mundane things, let alone find joy in them. The talented playwright Thorton Wilder put words to that enjoyment in his play Our Town, when Emily, a young woman who has just died, expresses how much she misses everyday stuff:

‍Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

I think learning to appreciate that reality is a path toward joy.

My mother wanted me to appreciate my American life and how lucky I was to be born here. She could get annoyed at me for ‘taking things for granted,’ as she called it. She’d been an immigrant child and wanted me to appreciate our home, a chance to go to school, and food. She’d had none of that. I can hear her saying, “You must clean your plate! Think of the starving children who don’t have enough to eat.” I learned from her that real life can be a gift.

My parents feared scarcity, and I’ve not known that fear. But I know fearful people. I sense in them an absence of joy, a watchfulness that invades the spirit. I’m old enough to remember the scare over nuclear war when people were so fearful they built shelters in their yards, moved far away to Australia, or made us hide under desks at the sound of a siren. We sang about joy in church, but we weren’t joyful.

The truth is that it’s impossible to prepare for all things that might happen. I like the story of the parents who went out, leaving their boisterous children alone with admonitions not to touch the stove, not to allow neighbor children to play in the house, not to open the chemistry set, and not to leave the yard. Then they returned home to find that they’d forgot to mention that the kids shouldn’t eat the daisies on the dining room table. (That’s from Jean Kerr’s book Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.)

We can’t cover all the bases. Too much careful preparation can turn into anxiety, where joy can’t emerge. For some, worry is such a constant that it’s called “free-floating anxiety,” and it brings us to our knees in panic and fears we don’t even understand. Experts have noted that anxiety is a trap in which we are caught, held from freedom to be fully alive.

Of course it makes sense to prepare for difficult times, provided we look up and grin. I wrote recently of the grasshopper who knew how to enjoy life, but now it’s time to write of the little ant who stored provisions, preparing for a lean winter. She missed living in the present, but when winter came she not only had a store of grain, but time to enjoy music, friends and family as well. (I made that ending up.) Emily’s words again:

‍Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

That’s the question I raise for the world this morning, as I sit here wrapped in a sweatshirt against the wind and missing my friend who is sick. I’m kept from fears today by the warmth of this sweatshirt, the light of my lamp, the coffee at hand — and Wilder’s beautiful words, reminding me that the present is enough.