Longing for Joy

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’d like to suggest, just do the right things because they are the right things – not for some imagined ‘reward’ of joy. The whole joy thing is a kind of metaphor for something that repeats itself in other forms right across our thought, morality and spirituality. I guess we could sum it up by saying, we’re always trying to solve things. And, at face value, there’s nothing wrong with looking for solutions. But life’s a lot more elusive than that. We cannot impose control on everything. We might not even know if we’re asking the right questions. And, in any case, even the ‘answers’ that we might deliver may quickly go out of date, and new answers must be sought. So, let’s be open just to moments of peace, and moments of joy – without worrying too much about why they arrived and what we might do to make them last. There’s freedom in acknowledging that we’re mostly not in control of very much. There’s freedom in just letting go.

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