I do not believe joy is a feeling that arrives. I believe it is a choice that gets made — repeatedly, sometimes hourly, and almost always under conditions that don't seem to deserve it.
That is not the version of joy that performs well on a phone. The performing version is a sunrise, a beach, a freshly poured coffee photographed from above. I have nothing against any of those. But I have come to think they are the postcards joy sends from somewhere it is not actually visiting.
The version I trust is quieter. It looks like a person who has had a hard week answering the door anyway. It looks like making one good meal because you can. It looks like noticing the light come through the kitchen window for ten seconds and not refusing to be moved by it just because the rest of the day was awful.
I think happiness is a choice. I want to say that plainly because it has taken me decades to mean it. Not a feeling — a stance. A committed, sometimes stubborn way of orienting yourself toward your own life, especially when your life is being unhelpful. The choice does not always feel good. It is often, frankly, the harder of the two options on offer. The other option — to take the bait, to lean into the grievance, to let the worst hour speak for the whole day — is easier and gives more immediate relief, the way a cigarette gives more immediate relief than a long walk. I know which one I want to be the kind of man who picks. I do not always pick it. I keep picking it more often than I used to.
Embrace the Joy Within
In life's grand design, we chart our way, Each choice a brushstroke in our day's display. No ready-made answers, nor destiny's decree, Happiness, a choice, for you and me.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →Joy, as I have come to understand it, is the byproduct of that choice over time. It is what accumulates when you keep refusing to be the person the worst day was trying to make you. It is small. It is unphotogenic. It does not ask to be admired, which is part of how I know it is real.
I do not feel joyful most days. I do choose toward it most days. Those are not the same thing, and I am no longer interested in pretending they are. The choosing is the practice. The feeling is whatever happens to land while I am practicing — and after enough practice, more of it lands than used to.
If that sounds less romantic than the Instagram version, good. The romantic version was selling something I did not need. The chosen version is the one I would still be working on if no one ever read a single word about it.