This time of year, injunctions to be joyful are everywhere—on cards, lawn decorations, storefronts, and signs. We seem to treat joy as a switch to turn on– we were not so into it in October, and we’ll be over it come January, but now ‘tis the season. And yet joy often feels elusive. The irony is that this elusiveness is not a failure of effort, planning, or even intention. It is a consequence of how we relate to joy in the first place.
The problem is not that we want joy, but that we crave it, demand it, and expect that because of the season, we can make it show up. If we do not feel the joy of the season, we feel deprived, like something is wrong with us; or, we get angry and caustic towards the whole idea of joy in the first place. Worse, when joy does show up, we cling to it and fear its loss– or feel sorrowful when it is no longer present. The grasping and chasing of joy generates tension rather than ease. We end up creating more suffering by our insistence that our experience conform to our expectations.
Joy tends to arrive indirectly when conditions are present, not when we force it into existence. When we practice being present and become more attuned to what is actually happening– rather than what we think should be happening– we become much more able to experience the joy of the moment. When attention is no longer consumed by regret or anticipation, subtle forms of goodness become easier to notice.
Closely related is the idea of enough, the felt sense we have all that we need right now, rather than awareness of deficiencies. This does not mean perfect or painless, but that life is complete as it is. Joy struggles to arise in a mind organized around what is missing, or what must change before we can feel okay. When we loosen that orientation, the pressure to improve the moment relaxes. Joy does not have to be added– it has always been there, we’ve just been too focused on other things to notice it or allow it to surface.
Even when conditions are ripe, joy may feel elusive if our attention has not been trained to notice it. When our minds are practiced in scanning for problems, threats, or deficiencies, joy may not easily register. Practicing joy means repeatedly orienting attention so that when joy is present, it is recognizable, can be embraced, and we know how to stay with it. With practice, what once felt fleeting or inaccessible becomes more available, not because we control it, but because we have practiced feeling it.
Joy does not require the absence of pain, and this can often trip us up– especially with the challenges that often come at this time of year. It can coexist with grief, fear, or uncertainty. We can feel joy while acknowledging that something hurts. This is one of its defining features. Joy does not eliminate suffering; it sits alongside it without resistance. My son is spending a year abroad, and while I am sad I am not with him, I still feel joy in his experience and adventure.
This is the irony– the more we grasp at joy, the more elusive it is, and the more we relax into the moment, not seeking it out, the more it is present. Letting go is not indifference, withdrawal, or disengagement. It is the willingness to allow experience to arise and pass without insisting that it satisfy our preferences. Letting go is not because we care less, but because we are simply accepting the ever-changing nature of our lives.
The holidays offer a useful case study. They are the time of year when we are most explicitly told to feel joyful—and for many people, the time when joy feels most elusive. Expectations accumulate, and we imagine how things are supposed to feel, or how moments are supposed to unfold. Comparison intensifies, and disappointment follows. The problem is not the holidays per se, but the expectations that go along with them, the demand that joy appears on schedule, and that it takes a particular form.
A different path is to loosen our attachment to our own emotional outcomes and expectations for the season, and to cultivate concern for others. During the holidays, this can mean setting aside expectations of what joy should look like for ourselves; instead, there are two ways forward. One, we can focus on what we can do to bring joy to others. Paradoxically, generosity is one of the more reliable ways of creating joy within ourselves. Alternatively, we can practice taking joy in others’ happiness. Feeling the joy of others actually increases our own feelings of well-being. As attention shifts away from self-monitoring and toward others, the grip of “me” and “mine” softens. Joy becomes more stable not because circumstances improve, but because self-focus eases.
When we learn to take joy in the joy of happiness of others, we come face-to-face with a counter-intuitive truth. The more we want to increase our own sense of joy, the more we have to look outside ourselves. This is less a moral stance than a description of how attention works. Comparison narrows experience; shared joy expands it. If the holidays do not feel joyful to you as an individual, that can leave you feeling isolated and left out. A way in is to just focus on the joy of others– to take delight in their happiness, to feel good about making other people happy.
The direction, then, is not to lower our standards or detach from what matters, but to loosen our grip. To attend to what is present, sufficient, and shared. Joy is not something we own. It arises and passes like other experiences. But when we stop chasing it, clinging to it, or asking it to shield us from pain, we often discover it has been nearer than we realized. If the wish is to experience more joy during the holidays, it helps to remember two things: joy requires practice, and it grows more reliably when our attention moves beyond ourselves. Practicing joy and practicing care for others turn out to be closely related.
Love,
Doc
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