I’m not really qualified to write these words. I‘m kind of a dour person. I know joy, but it is always diluted with other things. So, what I write here, will probably say more about me, than it might about anyone else. That’s the problem — I can never escape my complicity in everything I am concerned about. Anyway, what concerns me now is what I call, “rigid joy.”
You probably know what I’m talking about. There are people who really get on my nerves with their insistence that everything is just right. They seem to me, to be manically happy. It is as if, the weight of the world has magically turned to cotton candy. There is no room for uncertainty, no room for anything but a kind of Nazi-fied joy. Strangely, living in this present age, I’m used to, and not upset by, the standard rigidity of certain political positions. But, there is something about the knowing look of the joyhead that gets me.
This is a kind of fundamentalism that threatens to obscure, what to me, is true joy. I like joy, think it really is an appropriate reaction to this miraculous world, but have found that it comes in a rather paradoxical package. I haven’t really been able to separate joy from the heartache that seems to prevail everywhere. Pain and joy seem linked like sunshine and rain. It doesn’t seem like one can have one without the other.
Suffering and joy are related in my experience. This makes me restless when I’m around people who seem to only value joy. I want to run for the hills when someone goes on a joy-rant. I don’t condone such reactivity (mine), but neither do I seem to be able to contain it. I feel like a latter-day Puritan when I think that joy comes with a dark cloud.
I am trying to protect something that needs no protection. Joy is what it is, and can be distinguished from pseudo-joy. I know that. A more mature me should be able to rest with that realization. Unfortunately, I haven’t acquired that much maturity, so I still get bent out of shape. My joy goes south because I get too involved with other peoples’.
Joy, to me, is also a kind of effervescent thing — it seems to move quickly from place to place. Maybe, this is just another one of my limitations, but if someone is on a steady diet of joy, I tend not to believe them.
Joy, to me, is the experience one has when the storm clears, or when cancer is in remission. It seems to come as a balm for the suffering. I know that my medical trial, my near-death experience, set me up for a sense of joy. I had lost a lot, but there were things that remained. They have given me joy ever since.
Clearly, my own experience of joy taints my attitude. Maybe, life is enough to set off this deeply knowing satisfaction. I hope so. But, I still think that we owe it to each other not to substitute pseudo-joy for the real thing. The world around is too dark. The signals we send each other, can be life-defining, and are just too important.
May you know the joy that makes your life a true walk on the Earth!
