The Experience of Joy

 Mark Twain, the American author of The Adventure of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, once wrote, "Joy can only be fully enjoyed when someone else is happy too."

And yes, I agree up to a point. This Christmas, for example, was made very special by spending time with my extended family and being joyful together, finding joy in each other's company. Being joyful because everyone else was too. Yet it was overlaid by the sorrow of knowing that my mother is getting very frail and that this might be her last Christmas with us.

And when we read or see another in sorrow, it can urge us to do something to lighten that sorrow, to make the other person happy again, joyful again.

Unitarian minister, Lindy Latham, goes to the heart of the matter.. In the anthology With Heart and Mind, she wrote, "Perhaps one of the most difficult things that we have to do during our everyday lives in this troubled and demanding world is to discover how to embrace and experience moments of joy as they ae offered to us. Is it possible for them not to be dimmed through our awareness of the pain and demands of others, which can also include a feeling of guilt at our good fortune in the face of our difficulties?

    I believe that we can do this without denying the suffering of others, or turning our backs on their needs, or indeed by just leaving them temporarily on the back burner whilst we delight in our own joy.

    For me it is about learning to hold them together, so that by being alive to our own wonders and delights, this feeling can flow out to individuals and the world in a way that is both healing and enriching."

I totally agree with Kahlil Gibran's Prophet, when he says, "the self-same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears... The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." Because joy and sorrow are the deepest feelings that human beings can have, and I truly believe that it is not possible to experience either deeply, unless we allow ourselves to be open and vulnerable to whatever life throws our way - all  its joys, all its sorrows. If we choose to numb our responses to life, because we are scared of being too sorrowful, that we won't cope with the despair, the disappointment, the loss, the grief, we are also numbing ourselves to the possibility of feeling deep joy. And that is truly sad.

It is entirely possible to be full of joy at one point in the day, then full of sorrow later on. I remember one particular day, early on in the pandemic, when my husband and I went out for a walk around the fields which surround our village. The weather was beautiful, Spring was showing herself everywhere, in the ditches and the hedgerows and the fields themselves. We saw a red kite wheeling overhead, riding the thermals with such grace and majesty, and heard the pure song of a skylark. It was just gorgeous and my heart was full of joy. And it was wonderful to share that with my husband.

Then I came home and logged on to Facebook, to find that a dear friend had died in hospital of complications from the coronavirus. My bubble of joy burst, and I was filled with sorrow by the news of his passing.

And yet, the fact that I had been open to the joy of the surrounding Spring helped me to be able to cope with the sorrow I felt. Without the one,the other would have hit me a lot worse. I do believe that if we live our lives vulnerably, at a deep level, we become more resilient to sorrow.