Christy Writes: On scruffy guys in camo, pinky promises, and joy

A friend asked me the other day if I think joy is a choice.

It’s one of those questions that at first glance would seem to have an easy answer, but on deeper reflection I’m not sure it’s that simple.

Can we choose to feel joy? Can we wake in the morning and make the decision to be joyful? If not, can joy be taught, demonstrated, medicated into us? Maybe. But what about those days when you want to choose joy but instead you just feel like kicking stuff? Is it possible to ever find joy anymore in a world that seems to have lost its smile?

Last winter was one of the roughest I’ve had. My father died unexpectedly on Christmas night; financial problems reared their ugly, stupid heads; my little cat died (also unexpectedly); it wouldn’t stop snowing, I had car problems, a flu bug that wouldn’t go away, and lived in an apartment building in which the police conducted 5 a.m. drug raids. Forget about finding joy – I didn’t even want to get out of bed. To top it all off, I made the mistake of reading “The Shipping News.” Great book, but if you’re looking for some good escapist literature to lift you out of your funk, this isn’t one I recommend.

It all passed, of course, and I survived. As John Updike so memorably put it: We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. But one of the lessons I learned last winter is that one of the worst things you can tell yourself when you’re not feeling joyful is that you should be. Joy will come again.

For me, there are entire days that are just plain old joyful. Days that just feel good, like joy rolled in cinnamon and sugar, days when I don’t choose joy as much as joy chooses me. Other days, meh. Not so much. But here’s where I think the secret lies: finding moments of joy even on the meh days.

My very small friend Jasmine and I were out for a walk last week. I was tired. The sun and the wind were disagreeing over what kind of day it should be. Jazzy was chattering like only a four-year-old can chatter, and she kept running ahead of me. I told her not to get too far ahead and that she absolutely could not cross a street without me. She said she wouldn’t, but she must have sensed my reluctance, because she came back and pinky promised. Anyone who is or has ever been a little girl knows that there is no vow more solemn than the pinky promise. But here’s the thing: I’d completely forgotten about pinky promises. In that moment, when rosy-cheeked Jazzy held out her tiny pinky finger to seal the promise she’d made to me, guess what? I felt joy.

I was at the library earlier today – because a snowstorm is looming over the eastern part of the country and if I’m snowed in without a delicious stack of books, bad things will happen – and I stood in line to check out my books behind an elderly woman who was talking with the librarian. At one point her gloves slipped off the counter and landed, unnoticed, by her feet. I picked them up and gave them back to her. A moment later, her cane fell over. A scruffy young man in camo hurried over, picked it up, put it back in place, smiled at her, called her ma’am. And just like that, there was joy all over the place.

Whether joy is a choice or not, I can’t say. All I know is that when I keep my eyes open for those flashes of joy, I find them. And no matter how down I’ve been feeling about the state of the world today, in those moments I’m able to smile to myself and think, “Yeah. We’ve got this.”

Sophia, contemplating the joy of having stolen my writing chair.

 

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