Watch the ducks. Feel the cool breeze. Listen to the grass swish.
That’s what I just did, taking a break from answering Patreon comments, because we’re reading the book “Joyful” by Ingrid Fettel Lee on the Patreon, and we’ve been doing joy-spotting as a hook into the emotion cycle since the conference in March (among other things, of course). But as I was standing on my deck, watching the ducks swim and feeling the breeze on my face, I realized, I was feeling “joy,” but I wasn’t “happy” per se.
Because the feeling of joy isn’t the same as the feeling of happy.
Joy, for me, is connection. Deeply belonging. Love. Peace.
I worry that when we talk so much about joy, people who aren’t naturally happy by nature will feel like I’m engaging in toxic positivity. (“Pretend nothing is wrong because we aren’t allowed to feel hard things.”) And not everyone should be happy as a default setting. No.
But in the middle of body pain and stress and transition, I had a moment of standing on the deck and feeling like I was deeply connected and at peace for just a moment. That joy made all the other feelings go away, just for a second. I wasn’t happy, though. I’ve been doing emotional work for 20+ years and I have a very fine-tuned sense of what happiness feels like.
This moment of joy was just a deep and abiding sense that everything was going to be okay. And even though I was also feeling stress and pressure and disconnection and fear the moment before that, that tiny “glimmer” as some would call it (hopefully Vivy will see this and post that article about glimmers) of the world being as it should be… it just set things back to the reminder that everything was going to be okay.
It’s not happiness. It’s just peace.
And every single person experiences joy in a different way. For some of us, joy is the release of stress, and for some of us, joy is happiness, and for some of us, joy is gratitude, or it’s quiet, and for some of us, joy is loud and boisterous and celebratory. (And probably, at different times, it’s different things for each of us.)
But this was on my mind today as I was thinking about joy. Joy is just the absence of fear. That’s all it is. And most of us, when we’re feeling fear, we don’t know it, because we’re so hard-wired to feel it all the time. (And that’s our biology. It helps us survive. It doesn’t do a great job of helping us thrive, though… to thrive, we need to let go of the fear.)
So, along with the Patreon community, I’m taking a moment to intentionally feel the moments of joy that are already present. The ducks are already swimming outside. The breeze is already blowing. I just had to step out of my stressed-out brain and connect with that tranquility, and then I could go on about my day and do another emotion cycle, and be good.
What moment of peace/content/joy/happiness/comfort have you had today? What one moment can you make for yourself right now?
Becca