Life seen through a sunbeam

"Joy is life seen through a sunbeam." This week's quote, by Carmen Sylva, set me thinking. What did it mean?

Did it mean that we have to wear rose-tinted spectacles, so that we don't see anything that disturbs our serenity? Because if so, I have to disagree... if we are to be fully human, we need to be awake to the injustices and pain of the world, the better to do something about them. Heaven only knows there are enough of them, just now. So much so, in fact, that when I saw that my "reading for the week" from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, was about pain, I was quite relieved. At least I would now have the opportunity to share what is on my mind and heart, in the hope that it would help others to wrestle with it too. And I have done so, here.

Or did it mean that joy is the underlying condition of our human lives, but that we cannot always see it? I blogged about that some time ago. Part of that blogpost read, "although our thoughts, moods and feelings may change from day to day, or even from moment to moment, there is a deep, peaceful, sky-blue awareness behind and above them, into which we can sink, if we just have the patience to sit in silence for a while, and let our passing emotions do just that - pass by."



Or did it mean a willingness to see the best in everything, and everybody? That human beings are not naturally depraved and corrupt. That our default state is to be kind, to co-operate with one another, to share our belongings and our lives.

I'm currently listening to an interesting new book, by Rutger Bregman, called Humankind: A Hopeful History. His thesis, so far as I understand it, is that our perceptions of humankind are skewed, because the news we watch, and scroll through on social media, always and only fixates on exceptional human behaviour, which is generally bad. War, murder, rape, genocide and so on. "Good news is no news" as the old saying goes. Whereas in reality, the majority of people are better than that, kinder than that, more caring than that. He demonstrates this with many examples. I haven't finished it yet, but it is fascinating, and I recommend it to anyone.

(image: e-bay)