Happiness is a feeling. It’s the tingling warmth spreading from your heart throughout your body that makes you smile, perhaps even giggle. You feel it at your birthday party when your best friend gives you the perfect gift. Or when you find your favorite ice cream on sale and later take that first delicious, frozen bite. It’s what you feel when your lover holds you tightly. There is happiness in your tingling toes.
But joy is an action. A verb. Joy requires movement and engagement. Like learning a new dance, Joy takes practice.
If happiness is a waltz, Joy is a tango.
Joy reaches out to embrace you, first with one open palm against yours, followed by a strong hand on your back. You breath deeply together and then slowly shift your weight from one foot to the other until you and Joy are in perfect sync. Only then will Joy take a step and lead you where Joy wants to go. You feel calm and wide awake at the exact same time as long as you stay out of your head. Don’t anticipate where Joy is leading, just go.
Over time and with practice, the tiniest glimmer of beauty hidden inside the ordinary will reveal itself until everything around you is transformed. You’ll wake up in the morning and see the sunlight spreading across your ceiling, forming a prism of shadows and glare. You’ll hear a bird sing an opera when you walk out the front door. It will become easier to breath at work simply by feeling your own heartbeat in your fingertips.
You’ll stumble of course. Happiness and Joy will get mixed up in your mind and sometimes you’ll hunt for anything joyful and feel only emptiness. Keep practicing. There will be days when you’re gasping on the floor, weeping with a broken heart, and you’ll hear a child laugh somewhere outside. That laugh will reach you, enter your bones and fill you with light. Your heart will still be broken but you will carry it easier.
Joy doesn’t take away pain, it just helps carry the pain for you.
Joy doesn’t let you hide from life, it helps you fully embrace life.
Joy doesn’t ignore the misery in the world, it fills your spirit so you can face that misery and do something about it.
The only thing that joy requires is that you open your heart to it, which is the most terrifying thing in the world. Because if you open your heart that much, the secret self you keep locked up inside might come out to play. Then what would happen?
Take a deep breath. Joy will lead you safely. Just dance.