Contemplating Joy
People tend to think about misery, looking for its causes and ways to change it. We tend to spend far less time thinking about joy, and if we are happy, we may not question why we are happy. When things are good, there isn’t any pressure to understand why that’s happening to us, so we may not be inclined to investigate the nature and functioning of delight.
If you don’t consciously know what makes you happiest, and why, then it’s harder to seek that out. On a bad day, it helps to know what you can turn to. It’s good to be deliberate about the small things, because those are reliable. A cat cuddle, a coffee, seeing the moon, listening to birdsong, getting outside, moving your body, looking at things you find beautiful – these sorts of things are easy to arrange if you know which of them works for you.
Having a good supply of small, everyday joys is essential for your mental health. What happens if you need more than that? If you crave something more ecstatic, more rapturous, a more sublime kind of joy? How do we cultivate those kinds of feelings?
I’ve always been really people-orientated when it comes to being happy. Much as I love the wildness in the world, natural beauty, ideas, spiritual principles and so forth, people do it for me like nothing else. Early on as a student of Druidry, I was encouraged by one teacher not to focus on this but instead to focus on my relationship with nature. That was a mistake. My relationship with the living world has a particular shape, but my soul needs interaction with people and that’s not open to negotiation.
I’m going to start a thread of posts exploring joy in a more deliberate way, because I am one of the people who spends a lot of time trying to make sense of distress and I need to balance that better. I say it in enough other contexts that you’d think I’d have worked it out a lot sooner… but it isn’t sustainable just to be fighting against something, you have to be for something. This is just as true for mental health issues, I realise.
There have been times in my life when focusing hard on the small joys and beauties has been everything for me. I’ve had a lot of years dealing with really awful levels of depression. Being depressed can make joy unthinkable. Without the resources that support and enable joy, most of us struggle, so this isn’t always a solitary consideration and the quest for happiness will often involve a community aspect.
From here I intend to be active about seeking joy and more alert to where the scope for joy is in my life.
