REINVENTION OCCURS WHEN WE ARE no longer trying so hard to be ourselves. So does joy. We are happy when we are growing.
Therefore, to really experience joy, we have to do something we aren’t accustomed to doing. You don’t become joyful doing the same ole same ole. No one does. You become joyful doing the unexpected. This joy comes from expanding who we are, and becoming someone we had not been.
Oprah Winfrey’s physical trainer, Bob Greene, said, “When I first met Oprah, I never saw her experience joy.” This was in spite of the fact that the woman was as rich and famous as anyone has dared to dream of being.
When he asked her when the last time was that she felt any real joy, she had to think more than eight years back to the days when she was filming The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg (and in that movie, acting quite brilliantly, becoming another person on screen).
Since that time, she had experienced “little bouts of happiness,” but no real joy.
Oprah Winfrey was actually fortunate to have The Color Purple as a memory. Most people have to think all the way back to their childhoods to recall some real shout-out-loud joy.
But then Bob Greene began to work with Oprah to show her that joy was available to her any place, any time, if she knew how to get to it.
In his book written with Oprah, Make the Connection, he describes how the joyful moments began to occur again for her, and how “her strongest joyful moment I ever witnessed came in October 1994. We had been running for over two hours in the pouring rain during the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. I looked up and saw the 25-mile marker. It was clear she would finish. I turned around and I saw tears in her eyes.”
She had surprised herself. She had become someone she had not been before. She had grown.
In that moment, Greene thought back to when he first met Oprah Winfrey. She weighed 237 pounds and she couldn’t look him in the eye. She had made quite a journey since then.
Kids know where to go to get that feeling of joy. They are constantly trying to do things they have never done.
The famous cry of “Look Ma, no hands!” is a cry of joy, because the child wasn’t satisfied with just riding the bike. Then the same child tries riding it with hands up in the air, and the thrill is right there. There is no more joyful cry than when you hear a child yelling, “I did it! I did it!”
It’s doing things that brings a child joy. As grown-ups, we have forgotten that. We somehow think that it’s feeling things that will lead to our happiness. Then we start to think it’s other people making us feel things that will make us happy. Bad idea, because we’ve lost touch with what we once knew. We’ve disconnected from the spirit.
As grown-ups, we can even program the possibility for joy out of our lives by constantly seeking a “hassle-free” existence. By always wanting to find a comfort zone. By constantly looking for “security” instead of something that will challenge us and make us grow. Finding security is like settling on a permanent personality to live inside.
Look, Ma. No joy!
When we live as victims, we are always seeking to get into a groove or a rut. It is the rut of comfort. We forget that the only difference between a rut and a grave is a few feet in depth.
Meanwhile, although we’re stuck in the rut of comfort, our spirit is pacing around inside us like a dog whimpering and aching to go outside and run. The whimpering is sad to hear, and most of us can’t stand the sound of it, so we cover it up quickly with food, or adult beverages, or smoking, or television. Or all of those at once!
But the whimpering continues down in the soul. We can still hear it far away, down long hallways in dreams too sad and dark to remember. We might someday know that this beautiful dog that’s whimpering is the voice of our own spiritual dyslexia, the God (dog spelled backwards) within longing to express itself. The en theos that the word enthusiasm comes from. Longing to go out and run.
Most Americans have been programmed to repeat the question, “How can I get more comfortable?” over and over all day long in their heads.
But not the reinventing you. Not if you are reinventing yourself. Because then, you are different. You have committed to making the connection to joy, like you did as a child. You will always ask yourself, What could I do today that I know would take a lot of glorious effort?
You are going to finish a number of your days with the observation, “It was hard, but it was fun.”