2 - On What Obscures Joy
Joy is not fragile, yet it is easily obscured. It never truly leaves us, but becomes hidden beneath layers of distraction, fear, and self-concern, like sunlight veiled by thick clouds. To rediscover joy, we must learn what dims its light.
Noise and haste are the first veils. When life moves too quickly, attention fractures. We skim the surface of our own existence, never touching the depths where joy dwells. Joy moves at the speed of stillness. It cannot be caught in the flutter of constant doing.
Comparison is another thief. When we measure our lives against others, we exile ourselves from our own unfolding. Joy requires presence, not measurement. The moment we judge our portion against another’s, we step out of the eternal and into the marketplace of illusions.
Expectation builds its own cage. The mind says, “I will be joyful when…” and thereby postpones the possibility of joy into an imaginary future. True joy is unconditioned; it arises not because life meets our demands, but because we finally meet life as it is.
Attachment to narrative also clouds the view. We become entranced by the story we tell about ourselves - our successes, our failures, our wounds - and forget to feel the living pulse beneath the story. Joy does not require a plot. It arises in the gap between sentences.
Emotional self-absorption - even in the name of sensitivity - can distort joy’s frequency. When our awareness bends inward without openness, sensitivity hardens into fragility. Joy cannot breathe in the closed chamber of the self.
And of course, fear: fear of loss, of uncertainty, of change. Fear contracts what joy expands. But the strange truth is that joy and fear share the same threshold. Each asks us to open to what is beyond our control. The difference lies in trust.
Forgetting our belonging may be the deepest shadow. When we feel separate - from nature, from one another, from the sacred texture of being - joy fades. But even then, it waits beneath the surface, patient as the roots of a tree beneath winter ground.
To clear the obscurations is not to chase joy, but to remove what blocks its light. The work is inward but gentle: slow down, unclench, return to presence, return to gratitude. Then joy, like the sun after fog, will reveal that it had never departed.
A timely article and reminder. I had to have my old dog, Baby, euthanized a couple days ago. The grief and tears run deeply and consistently. But I don't that eventually I'll find joy again. I have to live through this pain in order to get to the other side where it will evolve into memory and with a lighter (as in not darker) constant love for this old companion of mine. She's at peace and not suffering so knowing that is the very beginning of knowing joy will come back into my life.