2 weeks Ago
Happiness and joy are frequently seen as interchangeable, but that’s something of an oversimplification. Happiness is internal and personal; joy is external and infectious. We experience happiness; we share joy.
The converse is not true. The opposite of happiness is sorrow, which certainly can be shared, but the opposite of joy is melancholy and loneliness, which is often endured in isolation. At this time of year (and perhaps especially this year), notwithstanding the impending Christmas season, joy seems particularly scarce.
Evening darkness intrudes earlier and earlier. Sunlight is diminished and its warmth weakened. Temperatures fall.
The dark days of winter encroach. Barren trees, gardens and farmland remind us of our own mortality. During a recent early morning walk the frost lightly covered the mounds of leaves fallen from the trees and gathered at the roads’ edge waiting to be collected.
A light layer of ice coated car windows and smoke rose from the chimneys of several houses. Not unlike our ancient ancestors, having celebrated the fall equinox, we are hunkered down in anticipation that when it comes the winter solstice will bring rebirth. Joy is a hope, but not now a reality.
Additionally, now is the time when baseball has taken a hiatus and we have lost the game’s fields of dreams. Baseball is often associated with our agricultural past, with a time when nearly all of us tilled fields, grew crops or raised livestock. Some view baseball fields as a reminder of that rural heritage.
We’ve forgotten that baseball, as we know it today, was not a rural phenomenon — notwithstanding the myth of Abner Doubleday’s invention of the game in Cooperstown. Baseball was an urban sport that became our “national pastime” during the industrialization and urbanization of the 19th century. As crops emerged once again from the soil, as buds appeared on trees and flowers to signal restoration of order and life in rural America, the sounds of baseball on urban streets and in urban parks provided a similar signal in American cities.
As former commissioner of Major League Baseball A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote, baseball revives each spring and we rely on it “to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” Worse still, those of us who favored a particular New York team witnessed an embarrassing and painful collapse.
To make matters worse, there is no promise that a rebirth in the spring will bring success. Joy is once again stifled. Arguably the most distressing loss of all, at least for myself and others who align with my political perspective, was of course this month’s presidential election.
One side focused on being joyful and positive, the other on fear and retribution. There was no joy to be found in the results. Sorrow, and perhaps even despair, replaced joy.
In the face of these events, where do we find joy? One answer can be found in Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Joy and Sorrow,” in which Gibran asserts, “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked ...
the selfsame well from which your laughter arises was oftentimes filled with your tears.” In other words, joy and sorrow are not separate and distinct emotions; they are one and the same. We cannot feel joy without some sense of sorrow, nor sorrow without some sense of joy.
As much as life cannot be disengaged from death, sorrow and joy are likewise bound. Yet there is a promise within this dichotomy. Gibran also tells us that the “deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
” The intensity of our sorrow creates new space for the intensity of future joy. Sorrow begets hope for rebirth and restoration of joy. There is no magic formula to find joy.
It cannot be promulgated from on high, nor can it be wished into existence. There is no clear pathway to find joy. Each of us must make a conscious choice to seek joy.
We cannot find joy. However, joy will find us if we are open to it. That conscious choice and that openness requires us — both individually and in community — to share our sorrow, embrace our grief, accept our failures, proclaim our anger, refuse to surrender hope, plan for our successes and never stop expecting to find joy.
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