Joy
“Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.” The minute we open our hearts to love, we become vulnerable to loss. But the only way to experience joy is to open our hearts to love. It’s a paradox, y’all.
I’ve been writing so much about negatives this past week I decided I’d better come up with something positive at least once. I don’t know anything more positive than joy. In my world view, there is Big Joy and there is Little Joy and both are good. Big Joy is that immense rush you feel when you fall in love, or win the lottery, or get that job you’ve been hoping for, or see your baby’s face for the first time. Big Joy is fabulous and certainly will carry one through a multitude of sorrows. Big Joy usually comes in like a huge wave, the kind that knocks you down, and then gradually fades away. It isn’t the type that moves in and lives forever in a happy heart.
Small Joy, on the other hand, is somehow deeper and closer to the bone. It consists of feeling satisfied with life, of waking up in the morning not just with gratitude, but with enthusiasm about what the day holds. Small joy is not a rush; it is more like a sweet breeze on a warm day. It feels like a secret that you want to share.
At the core of joy, big or small, is love. Love of life, of humanity, of country, of friends, family, and most of all, love of oneself. Love opens us up to joy and to sorrow. One does not exist without the other. In my own life, I have often tried to spare myself pain by not allowing love to break my heart. I can tell you this--that is like living in an airless desert. If one loves greatly, one will experience joy and loss in equal measure. It’s a choice we have to make.
Sending you love,
Jane
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