Risk Joy

I'm raising three very different children.

My son, Sam is not necessarily a happy-go-lucky tween.  He's relatively serious and when he wants something done, it happens.  His humor is dry and witty and forward thinking. He is polite and very aware of how his actions are affecting others.  A typical type A, achieving, first-born through and through.

My oldest daughter, Kate, the 10-year old is smack dab in the moment.  When she's sewing or playing piano or dancing in ballet or cracking an egg, she's feeling the experience.  Rarely worried about what others think, she's fully connected to the present.

My youngest daughter, Claire, the 6-year old has been dancing in the nude since she could stand.  She laughs openly and loudly with and at anyone.  Her motto is that it's a good thing to like her.  I'm not sure that she could be more comfortable in her own skin.

As a result of their world views, they each experience and embrace joy differently.  Sam is cautious. He believes like me, that what goes up, must come down...and that the world is filled with a lot of suffering, so we should temper our joy to reflect our responsibility to the people who are wounded or marginalized.

Kate thinks it's extraordinary that baking powder helps to make pancakes rise and that you can make your own dragon costumes at home instead of buying them at the store.  She embraces a "tickled pink" world view--similar to a "wow, who would have thought that this could happen?" mindset.

Claire never fails to share that her classmate farts at recess and pretends like it wasn't him.  "I mean, come on, he has a smell, everyone knows it's him.  And it has a sound too. It sounds like this...." And then she makes the sound and Kate bursts out laughing.  And Sam says, "Claire what about the people in Texas and Hurricane Harvey?"

And part of me feels similarly, how can we carry on at the dinner table, talking about our day, sharing fart stories, while many, many people have lost their homes, their loved ones, their memories and are refugees trying to pick up the pieces?

The world is filled with so much heartache and unexplainable hurt.

And then, it struck me that in the midst of sorrow and the unknown, our responsibility is to live.  This is why people laugh at funerals and laugh while they're crying in the doctor's office and laugh after a scream fest with their spouses or their kids or laugh when they've behaved ridiculously.

Because stress, fear, trauma, uncertainty and angst can only be sustained and endured for so long.  The real task is to live and to live fully....fully in the pain and fully in the joy.

So, at the dinner table, I turned to my son and said, "You're right.  It's terrible what has happened to the families in Texas.  We must pray and donate money.  But we must also risk joy.  It's okay to laugh at silly things even though heaviness is happening in the world.  It's okay to tell jokes and funny stories, even when there are no answers for the greater burdens.  Our job is to live.  So, Claire, let another one rip..."

As the beautifully, brilliant poet, Jack Gilbert once said,

To Sorrow is To Live

I don't know where you live, but here in the midwest, the weather is stunning.

The leaves are turning extraordinary shades of abundant red, orange and yellow.  The temperature is mild and the sun, at least for the past several days has been shining.

So, on my way to the gas station and the grocery store this morning, I was smiling in gratitude. 

I needed to.  I'd been moping a bit.  Care taking for my two daughters who have been down for the count with the flu and now feeling badly that my husband has caught the bug. 

Just as I rounded the bend, out of the blue, a friend sent a text to tell me that she was grateful for the spirit of joy I bring to her life.  I was astounded and probably looked like a dip shit with big tears in my eyes at the gas pump.  We exchanged a few messages; one in which, I lamented about how sometimes life isn't fair and that certain things don't add up.

That's when she sent me this:

"Joyfully participate in the sorrow of living," Buddha.

And then, a moment later, this popped up in my in-box.

As I was throwing ingredients into the grocery cart to make chicken noodle soup, apple crisp and pumpkin muffins, I started throwing it around in my head.  It makes sense.  There are so many attachments, desires, cravings, fears that we walk around harboring.  Some of them will be actualized and some of them will not.

I suppose, our job is not to wallow in the parts of us that don't work out the way that we yearn, but rather to learn to live with the outcome, the season, the challenge, the trial with joy.

Essentially, to relish as best we can in the sorrow, the failure, the shortcoming, the hurt and to trust that it is temporary.


And maybe to be reminded that

Here's to friends and falling leaves and quiet moments of solitude that let us know we're not alone in our journey.