Joy.
A definition of success is the freedom to spend time in ways that gives one joy.
Joy is more than happiness which is often transitory as it ebbs and flows with external events.
Joy is more akin to contentment and satisfaction.
Some believe it is momentary suggesting we have “flashes of joy”.
The joy that comes with deep satisfaction and contentment however endures and its contours do not waver with the oscillations of the transient.
Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.
Joy=Grace+Flow+Connection.
Joy encompasses grace, flow, and connection.
The joyous exhibit graciousness, they tend to be in a state of flow and connected to both reality, other people, and some things higher and deeper.
Graciousness combines respect for others, a sense of humility and a spirit of generosity.
Flow comes from learning, making and building.
Connection is some combination of a greater purpose, spirituality and relationships with others.
To be free to use your time to pay attention to what matters and what matters to you.
Or as the late David Foster Wallace said in his mind shifting talk This is Water:
“The important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
Appreciation.
Among the teachings of the Stoics is the ephemeral nature of life and the passing of time.
The followers of Wabi-Sabi in the Orient recognize the impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness of all things.
The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”
And Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she will stay right here because these are the good old days.
From all these individuals one learns three mental exercises to appreciate what we have:
1.Imagine a thing you own or a person or place you appreciate lost.
All of us have lost things and sometimes re-found them.
A set of keys, a wallet, a passport.
Other times it is our health or a home or a job.
As the line goes “we do not know what we have until we have lost it”
2.Imagine that you were doing something for the last time.
What makes the ordinary and every day extra-ordinary is that one day it will not be so.
There will be a last day a child will crawl. A last day you will see someone. A last day you will visit a place or drive a car or go to a restaurant. Sometimes we know the last times and often we do not. When we are aware of the last times, we have a higher sense of attention and a sensitivity to the specialness and the passing of the moment.
But these last times come every week and sometimes every day.
The ordinary becomes extra-ordinary when we pay attention, and we find poetry in the crevices of every day
3.Imagine that the life you lead is the life that millions aspire to as you aspire to some other life.
Most humans aspire to the next better and bigger thing. A combination of our hedonistic adaptation (getting used to what we have), benchmarking against others and other things (the income and home we thought would be amazing a decade ago may be seen as just okay when compared to others) and imagination (our ability to imagine greater, bigger and better or be reminded of it in our media streams) all drive us to next.
We sometimes define our happiness by our advancement toward the things we do not have versus the things we do have.
Most people living in the Western World or Upper and Upper Middle Classes of most countries who also have their health are living the life that billions aspire to.
The life we have got used to is the aspiration for most people.
We may wish to celebrate every new day as a day of thanks and gratitude.
Loss
If there are three realities to life they are learning, love and loss. Not everybody succeeds at learning or love, but everybody gets a graduate degree in loss and a doctorate when people very close die.
Joan Didion wrote two books on the loss of her husband “The Year of Magical Thinking” and her daughter “Blue Nights” which are read by many dealing with loss.
She wrote of the fragility of life noting that her husband died while eating dinner: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends” and the loneliness afterwards: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
And as time moves forward and people, places and hopes come and go people are shaped by what is no more.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day is not at all”
But in the end Didion notes we go on by forging new stories and finding new places and begin forgetting.
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
But one must forge ahead…
“Do not whine...Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
And to college graduates a few years ago she made the case for living deeply…
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
Time
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives wrote Anne Dillard.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? asked Mary Oliver
Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning.
Franz Kafka wrote “The meaning of life is that it stops”
And most of us can calculate the robust and healthy days left if we are lucky by subtracting our age from 80 (around which much begins to go wrong physically and sometimes also one may see a diminishment in mental faculties leading to a much more constrained life) and multiplying it by 365 days.
If you are 60 you have less than 7500 days. If you are 40 you have 15,000 days.
So, when someone asks you to do things without some form of fair compensation (it does not have to be money but could be learning, experience or the joy of helping) or does not respect your time, do remember you are the one paying for their dis-respect and their cheap valuation of your life!
In the future the ritual of the ordinary day will be special, just as we came to realize after months of Covid that the simple pleasures of free movement, meeting friends, sitting in a crowded bar, and watching a sports game were so special.
Life does not have to be lived forward and understood backward if we decide to pay attention.
Be aware of the fading moments of now.
Look around you. Watch the special quality of light or listen to the hiss of the air duct. Treasure the conversations and even the repetition and lack of differentiation of day after day.
Because one day it will not be so…
Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala
Thank you Rishad, for helping me pause my stride and just be. I will for sure make more of an effort of passing this to not only my own life, but also my loved ones.
Nice to see your photos.
Making an image is a nice way to focus on what moves you.
When I am alone the camera can be like a friend to whom I say, "OMG! Look at this."