Choose Joy
Every week, I look forward to reading Maria Popova’s inspirational and thought-provoking philosophical musings in her popular Sunday digest, The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings). Maria is a Bulgarian-born, US-based writer who exposes readers to powerful ideas, artwork and poems from gifted artists, thinkers, and writers from around the world and across centuries. Maria’s weekly offerings delve deeply into tender topics, often focusing on what it’s like to be a human alive on planet earth
Maria has been writing her blog for 15 years, and once a year she eloquently discloses a personal lesson she’s learned from all her wisdom gathering. Today, I want to share her life lesson #14—“Choose Joy”—because it lines up so perfectly with my father’s philosophy. The conscious decision to constantly “pick all that is delightful” was a central focus of my dad’s healing journey. In retrospect, I can see that the way he retained his mind to focus on what brought him joy instead of suffering was a highly successful example of what scientists now call neuro-reprogramming.
But it wasn’t just personal for my father. He wrote, “When my mind, heart, and soul choose that which is pleasant and good, I am sending messengers out into the world that make both me and the world more loving and joyful.” My father believed emotions are contagious, and he wanted to be a transmitter of positivity.
Myra’s father, Mendek, with her dog Zephyr, and sister-in-law, Laura, circa 1985
In my own life, I’ve been experimenting with finding a balance between consciously leaning into joy, but not as a way to escape my sadness or other difficult emotions. One of things I’ve noticed is that I can expand my capacity to hold multiple emotions at the same time—not just one or another. Life can be (and usually is) glorious and tragic at the same time. If I can only feel happy when my outer circumstances are perfect, I’ll surely be waiting forever.
So here’s some inspiration to choose joy even as we feel sorrow, taken directly from Maria Popova’s October 21, 2020, essay titled, “Essential Life-Learnings from 14 years of Brain Pickings—On the weight of the world and the weight of the sky.” I’ve left in all the live links she shared. Thank you for the being a transmitter of joy, Maria!
Maria Popova’s life lesson #14—”Choose Joy”
14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
