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What Is Joy?

I mean really, how do we define it?


Mr. Google calls joy “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” But to me, that feels somehow, incomplete.


With five years podcasting under my belt exploring the concept of joy in the everyday, I’ve developed a better understanding. After almost 180 meanders with people about joy in their lives; exploring books that hold meaning for me; and showcasing soundscapes from my travels, I’ve come to say that:


Joy is an effervescent feeling of great pleasure and wonder, born from living life fully and taking on the lessons learned from hardship along the way.


You see, the general definition that joy is a feeling of great pleasure and happiness misses a few things. Things like wonder and perseverance. The physicality of it as it tingles up and down my body. The reality that joy is born in sorrow, and vice versa too.


And abundance. Joy is also abundant. To borrow from the great poet Mary Oliver, joy was not made to be a crumb, meaning we can soak it up without worry we’ll overdo.


Joy in the everyday is what I explore in my podcast, Meanderings with Trudy. I’m entering into my sixth season, with listeners all around the world. I’m humbled by the thought that people are following along with me, sharing in stories that matter. Soaking up the soundscapes I offer from my travels. And remembering that in spite of all the challenges in our every day, joy is also there.


As I honour the past five years in my podcasting space, I want to share with you some background about this more nuanced sense of joy that I have invited you to consider. I also speak to this in the first episode of this new season. I hope you’ll have a listen.


One of the most perplexing ideas is that joy and sorrow are intertwined. I’m reminded of the wonderful poet, Khalil Gibran and his particular book of poetry, The Prophet (published in 1923). You see, poets are masters of putting great feeling into words in ways that make the rest of us “ping” with recognition.


When my mother died suddenly in 2015, she had a few copies of The Prophet on the bookshelf in her office. I picked one up. Held it in my hands. Opened to the stanza on joy and sorrow. And cried as I felt the visceral reality of his offering:


Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.


Indeed.


I had a complicated but deeply loving relationship with my mom. And in those early moments of my sudden loss, the challenges fell away and I appreciated the richness of what we shared while she was alive, something I’d struggled to appreciate for most of my adult life. My sorrow shone a spotlight on my appreciation and great love, nea joy, that she was my mother. As complicated as that was for both of us.


Deep pain. And deep love. Both are there, and lead me to a kind of joy that I had the privilege of her presence.


I could have turned away from the pain. But as the awesome researcher storyteller Brené Brown tells us in her career-torquing TedTalk called “The Power of Vulnerability:” you cannot selectively numb emotion. If you numb the tough stuff, you also numb out all the good stuff. If we numb out fear, we also numb out joy.


Ouch.


If you ever feel drawn to work on this stuff for yourself, start by watching Brown’s TedTalks, and pick up her books. She’s also got a special on Netflix called “Brené Brown: The Call To Courage” that is also worth your time. As a matter of fact, I will be doing a chapter-by-chapter review of her book, “The Gifts of Imperfection” on the fourth Tuesday of each month in this sixth season. I hope you’ll follow along.


David Whyte, in his fabulous book “Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words” builds on Gibran’s view as he explores the concept of joy. He writes:


Joy may be made by a practiced, hard-won achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our relationship not only to life but to death and our living with death, joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to, joy is practiced generosity.


Wow… “Joy is practiced generosity.” Now, that’s a place to live from. I wish I knew that when I was an earlier version of myself. I wonder how that would have made things different in my life… in my relationships?


Whyte goes on a few lines later to say:

…to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation...


Fear. Vulnerability. Acquiescent to the push and pull in relationship. With these words, we are brought into joy in community and reminded that we have to die to ourselves a little bit in order to live with others.


Joy is to be shared. It is not made to be a crumb, but rather a smorgasbord, a huge buffet from which we all can take and to which we must all give.


And finally, the great poet of both nature and heart, Mary Oliver, speaks of joy in a poem called “Don’t Hesitate” where she invites us to succumb to joy when it appears unexpectedly; to give in to it, and fully feel it. She calls this a way of fighting back against all the hardship that is always part of life.


And this is where my podcast was born. My podcast on joy in the everyday is an antidote to fear, the fear that was alive in the early days of the pandemic when I first started dropping episodes, and that is here now in the great upheaval that we are facing.


Oliver ends the poem by writing, in words that make me both pause and rejoice:


It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.

Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.”


Joy is not made to be a crumb. Don’t be afraid of its plenty. 


Good words of guidance as we face the fall, a resetting of the cadence of life. Lean into joy, it is not made to be a crumb. 


For me, personally, joy comes from a bunch of places… the sound of a lake lapping at a shoreline – which is why soundscapes from places I go are part of my podcast. The buzz of a bumble bee on the sedum in August. The silence of a late-night winter snowfall where the flakes are the size of toonies and no one is on the roads. The sound of my grandchildren laughing and the sound of my beloved when he enters the house after yet another trip to Costco. From the feeling of facing something hard, and with courage, finding my way through it, and from the unravelling that comes from loss and the ravelling back up that also comes from loss… all these kinds of things bring me joy, but do not themselves define it. It’s defining only by inference.


For so many people who have joined me on my meanders these past five years, joy comes from being creative… be it wood working, painting, rug hooking or making music. Writers of music and words have showed me how their hearts sing when they spend time creating and bringing nuance to memory in song or on the page. People have talked about being in nature, or eating good food as avenues to joy, but we’ve also heard many stories around hardship and lessons learned as they walked through those tough times.


Joy truly comes from the good and bad of daily life. From learning from mistakes made, from facing down fear with courage and resolve, and from growing within ourselves and in our relationships.


Put again into my own definition: joy is an effervescent feeling of great pleasure and wonder, born from living life fully and taking on the lessons learned from hardship along the way. 


I’ll have more meanderings this coming fall and I hope you’ll tune in. And I hope to more often put pen to paper and reflect that work up here in “Fits and Starts.” I’ve been remiss, and I’m sorry about that.


If you want more from me, check out my Substack. I’ve been posting there this summer, trying to force into habit a weekly practice of writing and posting. This summer, I wrote along with the “Meander Again” episodes I re-posted during my podcasting break. We explored Martha Beck’s book “The Joy Diet: 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life.” It was good fun.


With luck I’ll get back into writing in this space a little more often too.


In all things, be kind. And drop me a line, as you wish. Thank you for reading.




I struggle with vertigo but have been challening myself to hike in places with amazing views and high peaks. This series of shots is from a hike along the Amalfi coast in 2019, as a vertigo attack made its way though me. Fear and joy... both are here.


 
 
 

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