Guest Hijacker Jericha Senyak can be found at her blog The Museum of Joy. Like Tossing It Out, her blog is a rather eclectic blog. Keep in mind that for this post Jericha has hijacked my blog with her writing and her ideas. These ideas may not necessarily reflect my own, but I welcome the opportunity for others to express their opinions and philosophies. Do visit Jericha's site for more information about her array of interests and thought.
I'm Happy And I Know It...Now What?
I am naturally gifted with optimism. I don't mean gifted in the sense of talented; I mean it in the sense that the universe gave it to me as a gift, way back when I was a wee one. It was a
present, bestowed upon me basically at random, not something I earned or specially deserved. I just
had it - this great capacity for joyousness, this strange ability to experience delight in what seemed to be a greater magnitude than everyone around me. In a weird, subtle way it was almost like, well, some kind of superpower. Especially when I got to college and I was surrounded by hundreds of angsty, miserable, anguished young people, and there I was, going around
being happy all the time. And honestly? For a long time I felt supremely guilty about it. It didn't seem
fair. I hadn't done anything to merit getting to be happier than other people. There were plenty of wonderful folks I knew who deserved far more joy than they were getting, and here I was, bouncing blithely along,
hogging all the happiness.
Maybe that sounds strange to you - happiness is a glorious thing, after all! Why feel guilty about it? Well, to me, joyousness feels like a kind of "impossible good news," as Chesterton says, and an inherent part of experiencing it is that I want to open that experience to everyone around me. It throws open the doors of the soul, blows a bright wind through my being, and makes me want to
invite everyone in! Except, of course, I didn't have the least clue how to do it, and meanwhile I was watching all these people suffering and the best I felt I could offer was something stupid along the lines of "Don't worry! Be happy!" - which is probably one of the single most frustrating and obnoxious things you can possibly be told if you're feeling bad.
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This is basically my deal. You are more than welcome to
disagree with any part of this. Via Dammit Janet! |
You can't
tell somebody about joy and expect them to feel it, any more than you can
tell somebody about religion and expect them to believe it. I knew that, but I still found it confusing and frustrating to go around with this intense sense of wonder in my chest that nobody else seemed to share expect in momentary bits and flashes, with no way to understand why I had it and others didn't. I told myself that if the universe had decided to give it to me, I'd better behave in a way that was worthy of the honor, and that meant doing my very best to share it, to give it away, to open it up to others at every opportunity. In other words, if I was grateful for the gift, I had better pass it on. If I tried to hoard it, or just accept it as
mine by some unknown right, maybe the universe would see fit to take it away.
But I wasn't about to try and
make anybody happy. (By 21 I'd seen enough friends and loved ones suffer from depression to know that that just
doesn't work.) I just didn't know what to do, and in the meantime, my secret feeling that I was clearly supposed to be
using this power made me feel like a smarmy, self-righteous, obnoxiously cheerful, namby-pamby
jerk. Like, "Aw, I'm so happy and everyone else is so sad! It must be my job to tell everyone else how great happiness is!"The fact that this seemed to be my most crushing spiritual problem made me feel even more guilty. Man, people out there have
real problems, and you're worrying that the universe might take your good feelings away if you don't hand them out like damn Happy Candy? Really, Jericha?
That's your problem? Could you
get any more trivial?
And then, a few months ago, when I was just starting out on my blog and looking for inspiration, I stumbled across a lovely post on
Scoutie Girl by the thoughtful & talented
Gwyn Michael called
Learning to see again. the beauty in the breakdown. Some of her first words in the post hit me right in the gut. "I have been blessed with an uncanny capacity for optimism," she wrote, and in my brain something went
zing! because, you see,
I'd never once heard anyone else say that but me. Her post (which you should read, because it is wonderfully inspiring and beautifully written) was basically about the fact that she sees it as her prerogative to spread joy because, well, the world is a pretty dark place a lot of the time and we all forget how to see the beauty in it sometimes and dammit,
we need help. But the real reason her post meant so much to me was that
her experience
came out of suffering. She writes,
"The year I was thirteen I lost my father to suicide, my bedroom and all my belongings to a house fire, and whatever hope was left in my mother. It was a sad, sad year and shaped me in many ways. I remember coming into the house after the fire and looking into the shell of my room. Most everything was gone, but on the wall were the melted remains of a yellow princess phone dripping down onto the charred carpet. It was somehow beautiful in my eyes and I became fascinated by the beauty in the unexpected."
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| Here is a beautiful image from her post. |
In her eyes, as in mine, her natural capacity for joy and her desire to share it weren't some Pollyanna-ish unwillingness to acknowledge that darkness and despair exist, but rather a sense that seeing beauty is as deep a part of the human experience as suffering. And whatever bleakness surrounds us, when we manage to find our way towards focusing on the things that are beautiful and meaningful to us, well, something kind of magical happens. It's
hard to do this, and it doesn't come naturally to most people, but maybe, just maybe, those of us for whom it
is easier can do our best to lend a hand. At the very top of her post, she wrote,
What is mine to do in the world is to awaken people to other ways
of seeing. To inspire hope where there is doubt, love where there is pain.
Hearing this coming from somebody who had suffered terrible things and
still believed in this, well, it made me think about it a little differently. It gave me a sense that maybe I wasn't being so nicey-nice and self-righteous and pacifying in feeling like
well, this is what I've got. Of course, in some ways, it's still hard for me to accept this as the thing I'm supposed to do, because it seems so, well,
prideful, this idea that
I could awake
anyone to
anything. Who the hell am I to think I know how to open somebody's eyes? But really, the point is that I
don't. I have no idea whatsoever. Here I am, a sparkling champagne fountain full of joyousness for no good reason whatsoever other than I was born that way, and boy oh boy is it
not my job to try and force you to drink. ("But it's AWESOME! I SWEAR! just TRY it, you'll LIKE it!") Nope.
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Just doing my best to look meaningful in the snow, here.
Is this awesome or pretentious? Via Favim. |
Instead, I have to think about it like this: if I was a really violent, cruel, rage-filled, bitter, vicious person, would I influence the lives of people around me without even trying? Damn right I would. Would people look at me and feel like the world was maybe a yuckier place than they'd thought after I did something casually horrible to them, or just walked past radiating nastiness? Heck yes. So then, why do I think that somehow I'll mysteriously
not influence people by doing my best to be honestly, fully, genuinely joyous? Why am I so convinced that people will look at me and feel bitter instead of better? I don't think it's a terrible concern to have, really - I
don't want to march around like some kind of Queen of Awesome Happytown, looking out of my Wonder Carriage and scattering scraps of minor contentment as largesse. If I start thinking I can
save anybody, I'm in serious trouble. No, if I'm going to add anything to this universe, I've got to be something more like a lighthouse, maybe, or the lamp in the window on a dark night, or the sun coming out on a gray day: just a steady, quiet beacon, not
telling anything, not
teaching anything, just a steady, honest manifestation of lightness and warmth in the midst of gloom, saying,
I am no less real than the darkness.
In all of this, what came to the surface in me was the desire to build a museum that celebrates the human experience of joy. We have a lot of spaces dedicated to general history, and a lot of spaces dedicated to the memory and experience of suffering and death. We don't have many places that honor and memorialize the millions of ancient, ongoing, cross-cultural experiences of gladness, wonder, and delight. I know perfectly well the world is full of pain and fear and anger. I don't think joyfulness is
better than that, or more right, or more true. My wariness to share and express joy came from my fear of being seen as someone who was trying to overwrite or deny the ugly things about existence, a happy person casually dismissing others' experiences of unhappiness or telling them that they were
wrong or
foolish or
not trying hard enough if they weren't just
being happy, like
meeeee! But I think Gwyn Michael is absolutely right when she speaks in her post of her belief that "in helping people to see in a more positive way, we give them hope and that gives them power. When we feel powerful we are motivated to work and to change."
It's so easy to forget that no matter what happens, what suffering overwhelms us, the universe is
still full of wonder too. That's maybe the very strangest thing about existence: that somehow, the darkness and the brightness don't cancel each other out. They're just both
there, both part of us. One is not
more true than the other, and we need to remember and honor and work to understand
both. I think there's plenty of people already working on suffering; I think the world could use a few more on the side of joy. What do you think?
Have you ever had the experience of feeling like you've been given something you desperately want to share, create, pass on, or work with, but felt like you couldn't or shouldn't act on that deep desire? What was it? What did you do?
http://museumofjoy.jerichasenyak.com/
At left you can see a recent photograph of Anna Smith who is hijacking this post of my blog. She must have a strange camera in that the images produced are rather, shall we say, unusual. You can see what I'm saying in the photograph of me that you see in this post. It's a pretty accurate image, though the surroundings are perhaps a bit more colorful than I recall at the time when the photograph was taken. When you are done with this post, make sure you go on over to Anna's blog Universal Gibberish for further instructions.
