Dear Diary, most of my previous thoughts about happiness and joy have primarily fallen into two camps. The first camp is in response to activity; if we feel happier for doing something. The second camp can be described as a state of being we feel without stress. However, the more I’ve meditated upon my second camp thoughts, the more I’ve understood it is more of a trauma response assumption. The absence of stress does not automatically mean a presence of joy. The lack of stress could lead to apathy, exhaustion, or many other conditions of the human experience other than joy. Joy is much more of a mindset.
The presence of stress can act like a dam upon the flow of joy, building up a reservoir waiting to be unleashed, but that is not always the case. We must invest in and sustain our intention for this situation to maintain itself. Our environment must support our intention, or it will lose over time. If we are surrounded by people telling us we shouldn’t be joyous, we are more likely to believe it over time. If we are surrounded by people behaving a certain way, we are more likely to emulate their behavior over time.
Nelson Mandela said, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” If our environment contradicts our intention, we are likelier to operate from fear over hope. In such a case, we work to avoid consequences rather than achieve successes. We will never rise above a neutral position when the primary goal is to avoid consequences because our environment will drag us back into a negative state. Similarly, we will never rise above our opinion of ourselves. If we believe we are unworthy of joy, we will never be joyful; we can have momentary happiness in response to actions (the first camp), but fleeting moments fade quickly.
Intention and Joy need resiliency to thrive. Life will always deal you setbacks from time to time. It isn’t easy to develop resiliency without experience. Do you have ten years of experience developing your intention and your environment or one year repeated ten times? Have you done the same thing repeatedly, hoping for a different result? Nothing changes unless something changes. Have you practiced avoidance all along, afraid to make the personal or environmental changes necessary to break the dam? It is only avoidance if it requires your attention, and much of modern life’s attention-seekers can be ignored. They aren’t likely to contribute positively to your environment anyway.
What is joy? Joy is a response to activities bringing cheer to our life and a cultivated mindset allowing for those activities to exist. Joy is also a passive state of being born of an appreciation and gratitude for life. Joy can be found in the peace of a quiet snowfall, a warm meal with loved ones, an uplifting song, a timely joke, the sense of completion of a job well done, and so much more. Joy can be found in stress, but the scales must be balanced. We excel at focusing on the negatives, so purging the worthless negatives can be of great value. Construct an environment allowing you to focus on hope and happiness rather than fear and fighting. You are worth it.