Reclaiming An Understated Joy

Gosh, there’s so much going on. So many important things to write about, wield about, to care about. What is it today? An exposé on another crooked GOP lawmaker? The overdue overthrow of American Evangelicalism and a reinstitution of faith? Deaths of despair impossibly trending upward post-pandemic? A motion to ban teachings on Critical Race Theory? The worsening crisis in India? Vaccine equity? 

Adam Grant in his NY Times piece describes the blah we’re all feeling, a more technical term, ‘to languish’: “It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it just might be the dominant emotion of 2021. 

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being.”

I think this has much to do with our being microcosms functioning at macrocosmic levels. Ants drinking from a firehose of crucial information, leaving our own hills to die, perpetuating a plague of destitute colonies all over. With too much shit to bear, we say grace as an extension of grief, a prolonged numbness. Our unadulterated joy is a privilege, offensive even. So many are unwell — try to be sensitive, won’t you? We’ve learned to keep our joy under wraps as some sort of signal that we care. 

Sometimes it’s good just to say something unimportant. Something silly. Our first hummingbird of the season, for instance, has found its feeder. He’s been back everyday since. Its tiny body like an uncatchable star, its tiny, excited wings like the most miniature fan. Its tiny beak, like a twig, lapping up a sugary nectar from its new red glass bulb. 

The Wisteria my husband planted is finally climbing its trellis, peering into the guest room window. Our mint is doing brilliantly in this Maytime humidity. We ought to prune her, but you almost don’t want to! Our girl felt rain touch her skin for the very first time. We sat out back and listened as it hit like pellets in the gutter. Then I held her out, like Rafiki with Simba, just enough for the afternoon storm to touch her legs. She wriggled a bit but wasn’t upset. I massaged the drops into her pudgy thighs like lotion, let her toes the size of corn skim the dew off the grass. 

It’s nothing really to write home about, but it isn’t silly, is it? A momentary bond with the world behind us and before us. The presence of being, of meaning, of mattering. It’s tempting to bow with our small, selfish triumphs, handing them over in reverence to a despair that’s far bigger than us. But I think we’ll see that our capacity for caring enlarges when we tend again to our hills, making no apology when we drink from a spout our size. Please, for the sake of flourishing, reclaim your understated joy.