abtw777

It’s an elusive concept – joy. Just that moment – an occasional moment – when you stop and think to yourself that you’re really content – profoundly content. And not for any obvious reason. To be honest, I’ve always thought of joy in this way. I’d placed it on top of a hierarchy, with pleasure on the bottom rung and happiness in the middle. Pleasure – fleeting and superficial. Happiness – long-term pleasure and purpose. Joy? Well, something profound, transcendent, mystical and, well, superior. The problem with all this is that it can end up being a striving after that ‘higher’ joy – even whilst advocates for joy look down on ‘mere’ pleasure and happiness. Somehow, if we live our own lives in the right way, set up the right goals or somehow configure our consciousness correctly – then we’re deserving of a lasting and profound joy. Well, I’m not meaning to suggest that this doesn’t happen for some people. But the rest of us might be left struggling and floundering. Instead, I’...

It’s a noisy world – and it just keeps getting noisier. The really puzzling thing – for me – is that so many other people seem not to be troubled by the noise. In fact, some folks actually find silence disturbing. Silence means being confronted by our own thoughts perhaps – so is it this that disturbs these people? Or maybe there’s a more mundane explanation – if you’ve been brought up surrounded by noise then the absence of noise is bound to feel disconcerting. Then there’s another kind of ‘silence’ – the silence of a forest or a deserted shoreline. Of course, such places are full of ‘sound’ – and most of it is not ‘noise’ – that’s an important distinction. But I fear that many folk would still find such places disconcerting because of the absence of human sound. I wonder about all the shrill and shouty voices – the excessive assertiveness. Is it about not being heard by our politicians and by civil society? So, people somehow think they can compensate by just being really lo...

I could tell you the story I have of myself but that might just be a distraction from what I’d like to say in this essay. Instead, let me just start with the premise that everyone has a story of themselves. The story probably consists of a mixture of family, surrounding culture and personal circumstances – especially one’s experiences as a child. It’s taken me a long time to come to the place where I feel I have to forgive myself for my own story. This is not to say that I’m especially good or bad – just that, like everyone else – it’s really difficult to step out of our stories once they’re established. And also, forgiveness is not a one-off event – in my view. Whether you’re a religious person who believes in a God of forgiveness or you’re an atheist, I think it’s helpful to think of forgiveness as a process. And now, well, I’m turning towards at least being able to think about forgiving other people their stories. Again, this is not about whether other people are good or bad...

It occurred to me recently that we have a choice. We can have a little life – a life based on gradually diminishing pleasures until, one day, we snuff it. This is the life that converges on a cost-benefit analysis of life – on an accountant’s truth. Or we can have the kind of life that the heart is leading us towards. It is – we might say – a divergent life. Instead of settling for what’s possible, the heart dreams big – longing for new joys, new ecstasies – and along he way the heart accepts new fears, new pain, new heartache. And, well, I have to admit that often I still long for the little life – the life that’s controlled, managed and predictable. But, all the while, there’s a sense of that radical alternative life – the sound of giant wingbeats somewhere far off. It’s the wingbeats of a Wild Cosmos, speaking to the wild soul. So there’s no little life possible really – the Cosmos will always intervene. The lessons of the heart are tough – joy earned through heartache, pl...