My meditation teacher challenged our group recently to consider something many of us have lost perspective on during the last two years.
“Consider a single moment when you or someone you know experienced joy.”
At first I couldn’t think of anything or anybody. Everybody I know is suffering, if not with COVID itself, then with the fear of COVID, with the isolation of COVID or with the lingering effects of living with a pandemic for two years.
“It can be small. Your joy doesn’t have to be that big or dramatic,” she said.
I remembered then an encounter I’d had earlier in the week.
It was during a Zoom appointment with a new physician. Atypical of harried, hurried doctors these days, she’d surprised me by spending almost an hour with me. She’d mostly listened as she seemed genuinely respectful of what I had to say, ultimately agreeing with my opinion on how to fix a mild thyroid problem.
I was so taken by her approach that as we finished, I spontaneously blurted out, “I just adore you!” which caused both of us to giggle like new best friends.
It was a tiny thing in the scheme of things, this resonance of spontaneous affection between two strangers.
But in the telling of the moment to my meditation group, it filled the spaces among us.
And it occurred to me just then that suffering can take over our lives.
Or these bits of joy can.
It’s easy to think of the world as hostile these days, which, in many ways, it is. The human race is being threatened by climate change, corporate greed, vicious ideology wars and now super germs we used to only come upon in movies.
In the case of my family, our lives have been further complicated by my ex-husband’s rapidly progressing dementia and by my serious and chronic health problems, which have forced our young adult children to move home to help.
The challenges are daily. Fear, uncertainty and grief constitute the paradigm as my children and I stay braced for the next crack in the sidewalk.
Given these scenarios, it’s easy to lose sight of a balanced life that realistically includes, yes, suffering, but also surprise, wonder, amusement and joy.
And yet “What would happen if we moved into joy?” my meditation teacher asked. “What if we made it a point to look for joyful experiences in the midst of our difficulties?”
The fact is, we might encounter joyful feelings everywhere, she said.
This is not denial, she said.
"This is not avoidance of suffering. This is making a deliberate choice to watch for the light in the dark.”
I thought about this the other day after my appointment with the cranial-sacral therapist who is tending the painful sciatica that has doesn't seem to want to go away. The snow here in northeast Ohio had stopped for the first time in weeks. The thermometer read 52. As I hobbled to my car, I could hear the joyful singing of birds that had come out of nowhere to celebrate. I got in my car, and, cracking open my window, I made the conscious decision to stop thinking about the sciatica. And I let the birds sing me home.
As it turns out, I realize, I can expand into joy whenever I choose, when I study the rays of the sun streaming through my bedroom window in the morning or the steam rising off my oatmeal. I find joy in encounters with other people, with my children when we share an old family prayer after a difficult visit with their dad and before a meal. I find joy with the workers at the local natural food store who shop for me and never complain when I call back three times to add to my list. I think of the caregivers at my ex-husband’s memory-care facility as the children and I prepared to leave him one night. Steve was having a hard time watching us leave. Not one, not two, but three nurses and aides came to stand by his bed and distract him with jokes while we left.
The world can feel like a suffering, painful place. And yet when I turn my head a twist to the right or the left, I can almost always find a real, live moment of joy right in the middle of it. These moments can expand, too. Joy has the potential to take root in my heart, too, not in place of suffering, but alongside it.
Finding joy may not always come naturally for me right away. For now, it is a deliberate act. But given nurture and attention, maybe one day it will happen on its own again.
“The seed of suffering may be strong,” wrote the late, great Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh. “But don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. When one tree in the garden is sick, you have to care for it. But don’t overlook all the healthy trees.”
“Take down a musical instrument,” wrote the great poet Rumi hundreds of years before COVID. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
