Let’s talk about joy. Like real shiny, sunshine, sparkle, life-is-beautiful joy.
It sometimes seems elusive, doesn’t it? There is so much suffering in the world, so much pain, so much loss. The idea of joy can seem far off. Distant. It can seem like joy is for other people.
It’s not as if joy is something you buy at a convenience store. Joy is not a product to be purchased or something that you can pick up on your way home from work. It’s also more than just a feeling. Whereas happiness is about a temporary emotion, joy has something to do with disposition, some kind of inherent knowledge, practice, and presence about it. So, how do we obtain it?
Velcro and Teflon
They say that the mind is like Velcro for negative thoughts and Teflon for positive ones. In other words, negative thoughts stick. Positive ones slide right off. Scientists call this human tendency “negativity bias”, such that we are more prone to recall the negative, fearful, or depressing thoughts and quickly dismiss or forget the positive ones. Why?
Elephamammoths
Humans haven’t always had this level of ease in their lives. More likely than not, our ancient ancestors were going to be eaten by a huge sabretooth predator or trampled by a herd of prehistoric elephamammoths. If we missed an opportunity for food, it wasn’t that big of a deal, we could typically find something else; but if we missed a threat? Done. Gone. No hospital, no medicine, dead. End of gene pool. This meant that our brains had to always be scanning the horizon for these threats, honing our attention on anything that might take us out. Looking around for the perfect piece of fruit on a glorious sunny day or sitting and attending to a beautiful sunset was just not high on the priority list. And so our brains adapted to keep us alive.
But now, most of us don’t have to live at this level of physical vulnerability (most of us, but clearly not all of us – see also Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, etc. – which is another post, for another time). Most of us sit at desks and look at screens, and generally have more safety and leisure. But our brains are still scanning the horizons for the modern-day elephamammoths…the anxieties, the fears, the insecurities.
Velcro. Teflon.
Our brains’ reactions to thoughts don’t match our modern circumstances, and this can often cause a lot of mental and emotional pain.
How Does Your Garden Grow?
While the Teflon and Velcro metaphors are helpful in understanding where we’ve come from and our built-in evolutionary tendencies, these metaphors stop short of helping us think about what to do about this mismatched modern human lifestyle/prehistoric brain situation that we find ourselves in. How do we find and live into joy in our everyday lives given these tendencies to dwell on negativity?
As an alternative, I like to think about the mind as a garden instead. A big, rich, deep, garden that requires a lot of effort and care.
To me, it looks a lot like this:
Spiritual Composting
At the end of autumn, we take all the agony and loss from the year’s newspapers, our old vegetable memories, and rotten apple core wounds and let them seep in the ground. We turn it all up from time to time and allow the earth to soften what seemed disgusting and nonredeemable. We learn that the painful, moldy bread experiences of our lives were exactly what we needed to make the soil for this joy-cultivating process.
Thich Nhat Hanh says, “no mud, no lotus”. In other words, somehow, through a spiritual composting process that is beyond my understanding, the “ick” of life, the discarded, rotting, and sloppy experiences, if properly cared for, given a little shaking from time to time, and allowed to run their due course (with lots of wormy therapy and rain-dropy love), actually transform into richness. This “ick” is the necessary ingredient for fertile, black, wisdom-rich soil; if it has been aerated and attended to, it can be ready to accept the opportunity of new growth.
The Seeds
And then we plant the seeds. The moments of our lives. Into our abundant, earthy minds. Each one supple, ready to be planted, and full of potential.
We tend to and care for each seed, each tender, fleeting and numbered moment. Giving our full attention to each one, pulling up the weeds of bitterness or toxicity, attending to our negativity bias when it pushes up from the ground, trimming back the hedges of hatred. And then we water each moment with compassion, attention, and care.
The Harvest
We watch our minds grow, transforming, finally growing into a harvest, shared through our creativity and connection. The seasons turn, and we start all over again. Because joy is a process. It’s a tending to and cultivating.
Because, as it turns out, joy is not bought. Joy is not bargained for.
With lots of work, practice, and attention, joy simply blooms.