What Happened To Joy?

Joy. Is that what we’ve been looking for all these years?

As I write these words, I’m sitting in a deflated beanbag chair in an octagonal house in the middle of a Patagonian forest, my legs propped up on a table to be closer to the wood stove. My head is kindly supported by a soft pillow; I can feel the warmth of the fire, and when I glance down, one of our gray cats blinks at me.

All that is lovely. Idyllic, even. More to the point, it’s pleasurable, like the dark chocolate bar sitting on a shelf in my kitchen. We’re splitting hairs here, but it’s not what I mean by joy (for the purpose of this article).

If I were to ask you what brings you joy, I’m actually asking a pretty deep question. I’m not asking what feels good. I’m not asking what you do to jump-start your hormones or give yourself a shot of adrenaline. I’m not asking you how you trick yourself into feeling alive.

I’m asking: is there something that you do (or think about doing) that brings with it a swell of energy from beyond you (so to speak), something that makes you feel pointedly alive—as in, in the depths of your being, you know you were meant to do this, not just for you, but for all?

Is there a deep, crusty part of you that, if you don’t do it, dies?

What is that thing?

Why don’t we talk about this?

We may avoid the subject because it is often the source of torment. Guilt, evasion, negation, shame, terror, not-good-enough, or “I would do it, if only X.”

All that, and more, can live in that place. In short, there’s a lot going on here.

What happened to joy?

I could say these various sources of inner torment are analogous to a bunch of big boulders blocking a bubbling wellspring of joy in all of us, but how much good would that do?

In some small place inside us, most of us probably sense that. I was mired for decades in those feelings and beliefs. Completely and utterly blocked. If someone had told me, nine years ago: they’re just like big rocks! All you have to do is move them!

Well, that wouldn’t have helped me so much.

The operative question—leaving aside the fact that our dominant society and economic system is decidedly uninterested in joy after the age of, say, eight—is how exactly one de-obstaculizes one’s relationship to joy.

I’m here to share my story about joy in the hopes that you will share yours (please do, or else I feel like I’m talking to a wall). In so doing, I’m not saying what worked for me will work for you, because there are many paths. Everyone’s got their own unique thing going on. For me, finding the answer to "what happened to joy?" involved drilling down into two key questions:

What brings me joy?

Why not do it?

I’m summing up a process of 10+ years here, mind. In my case, the second question took me years, because my ego (a word I use to refer to the constellation of beliefs that crystallized into a personality I mistakenly thought was ‘me’) had a lot of reasons why not. Some of its favorites were:

You’re not good enough. You’ll fail. It’s too hard. Who do you think you are?

And so on. Sound familiar? Maybe yes, maybe no. Most of us have our own variants, our own monsters.

Once I actually saw what was blocking me (a process in and of itself), I got curious about it. The Work of Byron Katie, a way of investigating stressful thoughts, helped me here. She proposes that suffering exists to “wake us up” to the fact that we’re believing something totally bogus for our being. True? Not true? You can try it out and see for yourself.

I tried it out. I started to ask myself if it was true that I wasn’t good enough to do music professionally. At one point in my life, given where I felt pulled, the answer to that question was yes, so I went to music conservatory. Later on, I began to question what “good enough” even means, and how the ego must compare in order to make that a “reality.” In the arts, the good/bad argument collapses rather quickly given that, once one has a sound basis in one’s field, tastes are wide and “good” is blatantly subjective.

In short, I started investigating all the beliefs that held me back, but not for the purpose of eliminating them, just to see if they were really true. I was curious. I didn’t have an agenda. I really wanted to know.

The song Orbiting Source, whose music video I just released, is about living from a place of honest questioning. Its intent is to create an opening in the listener, a place to listen closely to what one really wants deep inside, to ask why one is here on this dear Earth.

As the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (whose poetry is featured extensively in that song thanks to the generosity of translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy), wrote to an aspiring poet a century ago:

“Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”

Rilke and his young friend found joy, as defined here, in writing.

What is it that, if you were suddenly unable to do it, would kill something deep and important within you—even if that thing is, as of yet, an unrealized potential?

I really do want to hear your answers to this.