My first foray, my first venture into joy or joyous is trying to figure out what joy is. After all we don’t know necessarily what words mean when it comes to feelings… do we. We, children, watch and learn… but in a world where what you see is a mask, what you see does not represent a feeling accurately, because the person isn’t feeling it, because the person is faking it, the looks don’t help.
My hunch is that joy is fabricated with the intention to cause craving for it, to cause an acute sense of the lack of it.
Actually, when I watch people who enjoy something, they don’t smile. Smile is for the outside, social grease. They are deeply connected to something… The pictures of people enjoying something are fake… no enjoyment. I know, I feel what they feel… no joy. Joy interrupted.
Joy is inner, smile is outer. NOT joy.
Joy is a feeling that says something is enjoyed, and, surprisingly, it makes you want to expand…
So, as you see, my first access to joy is the word: enjoy.
You enjoy something, or you don’t. (Enjoy: take delight or pleasure in an activity or occasion).
When you don’t: it doesn’t mean it is NOT enjoyable, it means that YOU don’t take the time to enjoy it.
It happens to me with food, with travel, with music.
I choose to pay attention to something else… mostly stuff in my head, something that bothers me, or something that I want to prepare for… so I am not present.
Hm, not present. This came up a lot in yesterday’s workshop: mothers not listening to their children, instead preparing what they want to say. They call this communication… and it results in mayhem.
OK, so there is a listening skill needed to enjoy. Listen to the food, watch the world pass by in travel, and hear the sounds dance in the ether playfully with music.
I think I can do that.
Today, when I woke up, I didn’t get up right away, and then I heard the birds on my Harmonizer audio, and smiled. Listened to it a while. It was like music, happy, unconcerned whether it is cold or not. It was like a brook singing… unconcerned.
That was nice. Being with that. Maybe that was joy.
Then, finally, I got up, and felt the frigid air on my skin, and my skin was smooth and white and it met the cold that was dense and gray, and I won. I mean my skin won: it didn’t give in. I even delayed putting on clothes, it was so interesting and exhilarating feeling that battle.
Before I left Hungary I read a short story in a literary magazine. I have thought of it hundreds of times.
It was about a novelist who borrowed a friend’s cabin in Alaska so he can write his next book in solitude.
One morning, as he went to do his thing to the outhouse the neighbor stalked him and locked him into the outhouse. The conversation revealed that the author seduced the neighbor’s wife… and this was vengeance.
The author went through the stages of hypothermia… starting unpleasant, but turning into very pleasant, enjoyable… and then drifted away. He froze.
I think I was attracted to the description of the stages of hypothermia. As an empath I could feel exactly what he said in my body, and I loved it.
I am afraid that if I went through that process, I would be disappointed. In comparison to the experience I had with the short story, it would probably pale in comparison…
And that is the problem with comparison.
When you compare, you are not in the present moment, you are in the past… or in the future, but not here… consequently there cannot be any joy… or whatever we’ll call it when I am done… lol.
But it seems that we spend, I mean we humans, spend most of our lives in comparison… i.e. not here, not now. So how can be any joy?
I remember a Christmas long-long time ago. My parents bought a tape recorder…and recorded the Christmas eve… us children coming in into the dark room, only the sparkles gave some light, then lit the candles on the tree, and it that near pitch darkness we each found our gifts under the tree, and teared the wrapping open.
For a while everyone was talking to themselves about their gifts, and then, louder, my father’s voice: “And I got my usual underwear!”
You can tell that he wasn’t present. Usual gives it away. He was in last year’s Christmas. Or he was disappointed because he didn’t get what he expected. Either way, could not enjoy the moment, because he wasn’t present.
I have experimented with being present before, and it was frightening. Looking into someone’s eyes and be present… It was blood-pumping terrifying… Kind of indicated to what degree I was never present.
I am present a lot, but not with my eyes. With my ears and with my feelings. Eye-presence still freaks me out.
We all have our own way to be present. Delight, hm, is this the word I have been looking for? Delight touches me in many ways… sight isn’t one of them.
Remember my article about the three possible ways the Beyond talks to you? Truth, Beauty and Goodness?
When you are touched… I guess delight happens.
What is your way the Beyond talks to you? Please share…
I’ll continue my search for joy in another article.
I did think I was touched by truth but the more I look at the opposites of Goodness these things badness, getting away with things just because there is an opportunity, this is my area of upset… the way the Beyond is getting to me.
sorry, I edited your comment. Why? because your stinginess came through, loud and clear.
And all your shares, all your comments are like that: if someone reads it without the previous comments or without the article, it makes absolutely no sense… I had to read the article and the previous comments.
Add this to the moves that will keep generosity open for you… Last day!
Hi Sophie,
One way the beyond talks to me is through “house names”, sayings on shopping bags, road signs. this doesn’t mean I am constantly looking at these things there has to be a question and then when I am not looking too hard I will get a sense, then the answer presents itself as described , it is joy, love and uplifting all at once.
so is it truth? is it beauty? is it goodness?
My hunch that it’s goodness, from the words you used, but I could be wrong.
My primary access, or better said: the beyond’s primary access to me is goodness… One other way to know is that the opposite of that really upsets me… Badness, corruption, betrayal, cheating, committing fraud are my major upsets. The opposite of goodness. Goodness is caring about the other.