Permanent Joy

If you were given the choice to feel only joy for the rest of your life, would you take it?

Would you, to your bones, for every remaining second that you have left alive, embrace the gift of joy?

I had to stop and think about that one day after I listened to a podcast wherein the hosts were discussing the idea of being forever joyful. I wish I could remember the name of it so that I could properly cite it here for you but it was a random “hoppin’ in the shower” selection that didn’t stick too much with me at the time. In this podcast though, the hosts posed the idea of permanent joy to the audience. and they, like me, actually had trouble saying “yes” to it.

Joy seems to be a gift that often comes with a set of ethereal strings attached.

What’s the catch with this perma-joy thing? Oh, there isn’t one.

Well, do I have to wipe my brain clean of my memories and experiences to accept permanent joy? No, not at all.

Surely I’ll have to insulate myself against global and political strife, climate disasters, and all forms of human suffering to do make this work? We’ll, nope. Not at all.

You just have to let it in.

I’ve posed “perma-joy” to many a friend and client over the fall. I became intrigued by the reasons that people were so reticent to accept something that sounded like the dream. Joy, always! Why was no one responding with an emphatic yes?

That question seemed easier to explore when looked at on the opposite side of the coin: despair.

Now, if I asked you whether you’d want to live a life filled with despair from this very moment until the day you die, you would immediately say, “no way.” Who the hell wants to feel despair ever, let alone permanently?

Despair, as we know, can exist in humans at levels that can be sustained over a lifetime. The very act of feeling despair endlessly does not eradicate or even lessen the feelings of it. Feeling despair will not get old and just dissipate. It just won’t and we know this.

So, what about joy?

It’s an emotion just like despair. It can be felt deeply and for long stretches of time, just like despair. For us humans though, the weird creatures that we are, the majority of us either can’t fathom joy being a sustainable emotion or, we simply don’t want to.

Much different from the “nothing gold can stay” ideology of Robert Frost or Ponyboy Curtis, joy getting old is less about its ability to remain and more about our desire to keep it with us.

If joy stays, we might miss a wrong that requires us to right it. If joy stays, we might not be able to empathize and sympathize with others in pain. If joy stays, we might isolate ourselves from a world in chaos and turmoil and we might be perceived as selfish or uncaring. Or, worse yet, we might miss a moment to help. We may not want the gold to stay because, when it stays, we lose something of the human experience that is so vital to being in these bodies.

Or, there’s the notion that joy gets old.

Days change to night, winters change to spring, our bodies grow and develop incessantly until we hit that wall that stops our force from staying in motion anymore. We are beings who are used to being denied entrance to that same river twice. According to these patterns in our lives, it certainly would be weird for that feeling of joy to remain, then. Forever unchanging. We would eventually grow tired of feeling joy and we would wish for a change of pace. We would want a return of the rhythms of emotion. Joy just cannot be as joyful if its all we ever feel. It just can’t be.

But sadness can always be that sad. And, despair has serious staying power.

So, I want to pose the question to you again: Would you accept a gift of permanent, sustained, unending joy?

I, like so many of you, believe that my highs feel so high because I made it through the lows. The bright light of morning moves me so because I’ve been through the dark night of the soul. I feel pride in my happiness because I felt sorrow at my misery.

For as much as I do not want pain and torment and sadness and misery, I’m not sure if unending joy sounds any better to me. That’s a very weird conclusion to come to in life.

But, it points me to a truth about human existence and life here on earth that overwhelms me with beauty: we’re here to learn lessons and grow. We’re here to learn compassion and understanding and it takes a bit of our gold getting tarnished for any of us to recognize the gold in others. And, almost as if by instinct, we choose the possibility of those connections— with all the risks and certainties of pain that come with them. And it is that…that desire to accept pain for love, that drive to accept hurt for human connection, that makes us miraculous creatures.