The River’s Flow: What Brings You to Joy?

The BOLD (Dip Your Toe in The Water)

In 1927, Max Ehmann wrote a poem called Desiderata.  The last line is excerpted below as our quote for this article.  In Desiderata, Ehmann lays out the basic building blocks of a good life.  What are the basic building blocks of your best life?  I suggest that they are the things most likely to reveal joy to you. 

My teacher, Julio Olalla, taught me that joy is simply the love of life.  I’m going to use his definition for our discussion.  I’m sure you’ve been asked the question.

“What brings you joy?”

I suggest a more accurate question.

“What brings you to joy?”

If joy is love of life and we are alive, then joy is always there, flowing just below the surface.  How, then, can we dip down into joy more often?  That’s the best question of all.

The Whisper (Find the Flow)

The hike had been arduous, and the pack had grown heavier with each footfall.  At times, I had trudged along alone as my companions’ long legs and more rigorous constitutions had set a pace that I could not match.  At long last, we had made our camp in a clearing just up from a stream and the chef for the evening began to make our dinner.

I went to the edge of the water.  The stream had carved a deep path for itself and I was hidden from the campsite as I sat on a flat granite shelf next to the tumbling water.  Relaxation swept through me, easing my tired muscles and stilling my mind.  I was alone, secure in the knowledge that friends we just a few feet away.   I lingered there, content and awe struck at the same time, until the smell of dinner lured me back up the shielding bank to camp.

That hike was decades ago but I can still conjure the feelings of that evening.  You see, I have learned that I connect with joy when I am near moving water.  I do not really enjoy being in water that much.  I swim sometimes and it is pleasant.  Real joy comes, though, when I am gazing out over waves or rapids.  Living where I do, I am blessed to be able to visit whitewater rapids right in the heart of the city.  How could I live anywhere else?

Finding Our Way To Joy

Knowing what makes us happy provides a recipe for creating more happiness.  Happiness, though, is fleeting.  It is a momentary response to stimulus.  

Joy is perpetual.  When we experience joy, we are tapping into the rich depth of the experience of living.  Joy is the love of life.  Often, we ask, “What brings you joy?”  The suggestion in this question is that joy is somehow absent, and we have to have it delivered to us.  

What if we were to ask instead, “What brings you to joy?”  

Joy is always there, flowing as we flow through life.  The moments when we feel it most keenly are when we dip down and connect with it.  Poets write about it, distilling the deep mystery of it all into the narrow confines of words.  Artists paint it, employing color and visual language to capture the essence of a moment.  We capture it when we are mindful of the magic of a moment, when we engage in meaningful activities and when we are present to our rich emotional life.  

The Role of Emotion

All emotions connect us to joy, even the ones that we often consider negative.  When we are sad, we are acknowledging the loss of something or someone we loved.  That love enriched our life.  When we are angry, we are experiencing a desire to fight for justice because we value fairness in life.  All emotions visit joy, ready to deliver their wisdom.  Joy is only enriched by our emotional life.  

Consider the word “enjoy.”  The en- prefix means “in or within.”  When we enjoy something, we are aware of our position in joy.  We are living in our life.  

When we experience challenges that provoke difficult feelings—loneliness, fear, sadness, anger—it is tempting to think that joy has fled.  Joy is there, waiting for us to shift our view just enough so that we can see it, connect back into it and flow with it.  

What, then, brings you to joy?  I am privileged to shop for my Mother-In-Law every two weeks.  In doing so, I crossed over the river and, with a jolt of awareness, realized what I was missing.  Now I make a point to travel down to the river and sit in my car, watching the water flow.  I also use videos of the ocean online to connect with moving water.  I know what connects me to joy and I am making a point to include those elements in my life. 

Uncovering Joy

Sometimes it takes a little excavation to find the roots of joy in an activity.  For instance, one client was mourning the loss of her Saturday shopping routine with her husband.  As we carefully dug into her lost routine, we discovered that she was missing a few things—time with her husband, a feeling of accomplishing something together, and the balance of familiarity and novelty in visiting the stores.  Now, they are making dinner together each night, enjoying the time together accomplishing an important, everyday task and they are trying new recipes to introduce novelty.   

I connect to joy when I hear a great story, when the wind picks up and leaves swirl, when children laugh with abandon, and when I hear music that moves me.  

What brings you to joy?