THE PURE AND SIMPLE DELIGHT IN BEING ALIVE
Words are like colors. We can all agree that green is the color of leaves or grass, or golf courses or dollar bills for that matter. But what I picture when I say green may be very different from what, say, a golfer or a Wall Street banker might have in their mind’s eye. It’s the same with joy. Each of us experiences and expresses it uniquely.
I knew what joy felt like when I was following in my father’s footsteps. When I talked with his fans and traveled the world giving inspirational talks, I felt the joy of adventure, new encounters, and meaningful connections. I also found joy in my work with my interior design clients—getting to know them deeply so that I could co-create their living and working spaces to reflect their truest selves. What I didn’t know how to do was find joy when I wasn’t working or traveling or doing things for other people. So I began where I always begin anything—with words. I read everything I could get my hands on by anyone who had ever written anything about joy.
Although innumerable definitions of joy exist, I found the one I loved the best: Joy is the pure and simple delight in being alive. That captures exactly how joy feels to me: the Wheeeeeeee!! and the wisdom, the curiosity and the quiet, the ecstasy and the ease. Even the word “delight” makes me feel, well, like jumping for joy! That’s because joy is a felt thing. Joy may be sparked by, brought to life through, and flourish in our experiences—but ultimately joy exists within each of us apart from whatever has happened to evoke it. We are all born fluent in joy. When we feel joy, we feel in sync with the Universe—which means, of course, that the Universe is in sync with us. Joy blesses us all.
I have always felt that joy and happiness were quite different emotions. Fraternal twins. Happiness, it has always seemed to me, is dependent on something outside of us. It’s transient and somewhat self-involved. Even if we share our happiness with other people, we often experience it inside ourselves in a way that can make us want to hoard and protect it. We hang on to happiness as though it were our favorite amusement park balloon that could pull loose at any second and float into the ether, leaving us on the ground caterwauling for its loss.
Joy, on the other hand, is what many have called a “soul feeling.” It comes from the inside out—that flowering tendril growing out from our hearts and wrapping itself in brightly colored delight around and up everything it meets. To feel joy is to experience our own well-being as linked to that of the larger world, to sense that we move through life as something other than our egos. Joy is the great connector.
Each of us is born with the light of joy—a light that we may sometimes fear has been buried in the accumulated darkness of our doubts and disappointments. When we can pause long enough to silence our tendency to fret, worry, and complain—and instead be grateful for what we do have, rather than focused on what we don’t—we always remember our joy. Even on my crappiest days, if I can remind myself to feel the bedrock of good that underlies my life, this planet, and the people and other creatures with whom I share it, what I feel beneath that day’s supposed woes is the good, the joy, the gratitude, the balance, the hope, the peace, and the love that have never gone anywhere.
Mark Twain believed that “to get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.” You can never completely experience joy unless you share it with others and they share it with you. Joy is the ultimate renewable resource. To hoard joy is impossible, because only when we share it will it flourish and grow. To get the full value of any life-affirming experience, we have to give part of it away as well as receive it from someone or something else.
Too often, however, the innate joy with which we come into the world gets plastered and painted over by our concerned parents, our well-meaning teachers, our peer-pressuring friends. Then one day we start to forget what’s underneath all that plaster and paint. We even start to think that plastering and painting is what we came here to do. It’s not. When we cease and desist our human doings and instead inhabit our human being, we remember our joy.
In this materialistic age of technological advances and disposable everything, however, we can fall into the trap of believing that joy can be found in things. But that new car I just had to have or even the latest iPhone I believed would change my life—a few years from now they will be long gone. Worse still, the exorbitant monthly payments for these “necessities” have, more often than not, robbed me of the joy I hoped they would bring. When I remember that the reason I coveted the car in the first place was to be able to go to the places that bring me joy with the people with whom I wish to share it, and that the conversations or photos or music for which my iPhone was the conduit were what brought me joy, then the choices I make begin to shift. I remember that it’s not the thing that I want at all, but rather the joy. That joy is already in me.
Leave it to Mother Teresa to get to the heart of joy by describing the joy of the heart: “A joyful heart is the normal result of a heart bursting with love. She gives most who gives with joy.” Joy and love are the double helix of our lives. One cannot exist without the other. To feel joy is to feel love. To feel love is to feel joy. To be of service, to reach out to a friend, to offer a hug, to hold the hand of someone in sorrow is to bring joy to sorrow and love to fear. Joy is being at the bedside of someone in pain or listening to their woes with a compassionate heart. The more joy we feel, the more we are able to give. In the giving, our joy is replenished—because its supply is inexhaustible.
At the end of the day, joy is what connects you to me and me to you right now. On this very page that I am writing and you are reading, joy leaps the time-space continuum just as it transcends national boundaries and political divisions. It knows no age or religion, skin color or calorie count. Joy is our home and our vacation, our vocation and our hobby. Joy is the channel through which Love flows just as Love is the channel through which joy flows. Which is to say, joy is everything.
Joy is a common language spoken heart-to-heart by all sentient beings, who feel the pure and simple delight in being alive that keeps us all connected to everyone and everything and to the Universe as a whole.
The more I read and thought about joy, the more I felt joy. Joy felt amazing, elating, hopeful, connected, freeing—everything I had hoped to feel when I vowed to change my life. Joy felt like the conduit from my head to my heart to the heart of the whole wide world.
I began talking about joy to anyone who would listen. I talked about finding more joy in my life. I talked about writing about joy. I talked about talking about joy more in my talks. I talked about the importance of joy as our heart connection to the planet. I talked and I talked and I talked a lot about joy.
But talking about joy is not living joy.
The fact is, I talked about joy because it felt a lot easier to talk about joy than to really live it.
Then one day it didn’t.
After four years of trying and failing, of working and working and working while thinking about but never fully experiencing my joy, I finally had had enough!
At the end of 2014—almost four years since my conversation with myself in the mirror impelled me to change my life—I decided that come hell or high water or both, I was going to show up to joy every single damn day. I had no idea what that meant. I just couldn’t stand hearing the sound of my own hopeful promises reverberating against the increasingly joyless walls of my life any longer. It was time to say goodbye to fear-based workaholism and invite joy back in for good.