{19} Shared Sorrow.

It’s easy to think about happiness in a very specific way. Joy is much the same. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been sold down the river of such experiences existing within a certain Feeling Framework.

‘Come live on Happiness Island,’ they tell us, ‘where life is bump free, your skin is smooth, and you’ll never have to cook for yourself again!’

Weirdly, despite my dedication to Happinesses, I’m untrusting of people who appear to be perpetually that way. I had a neighbour once who you could never talk to about anything that didn’t have a pleasant and neat ending. I found this massively boring and had very little to say.

Her censoring to the pleasant snagged my tongue because it reduced life to black and white, when it’s actually many colours and tones and spots and speckles (isn’t speckles a lovely word?!).

No, it seems that happiness and joy are actually quite gritty. And once again, perplexingly and mysteriously, they’re wholly dependent on their opposites to come to life in any meaningful and fleshy way.

One of my most best writers, Ross Gay, had this to say about joy:

“Far be it for me to define someone else’s joy, but the way I’m defining joy is that it’s what shines from us as we help each other carry our sorrows.

It implies many things, things that we would mostly think of as sorrowful, like the fact that we’re always heartbroken, every one of us. Among those heartbreaks is that we’re going to die, or who we love is going to die or change.

I think of joy as a grave emotion, because it almost emerges from the fact of the grave. If we ignore that, I think we’re talking about something else.

But there’s often a kind of immature approach to joy, which is why “serious” people will often say things like, “How could you talk about joy at a time like this?” First of all, it’s always a time like this somewhere for someone. Secondly, joy emerges from times like this.”

I know up until now, I have shared my happinesses of leftovers and dogs doing the zoomies and memories of childhood rides, but today, I want to talk about shared worries and sorrows, and how when you meet both of those things in a truthful way, there’s a very specific kind of joy that leaks in through the edges.

I’ve had a week of that. Of health scares with my most loved, and being witness to others  regress in matters of their health, and finding myself sitting quietly in the room squashed up against the feeling of mortality. We know this, of course, all the time, that we are mortal. But some days, her reality shines bright and we hold the vision more clearly of life danced on the edge of a volcano.

My happiness today is for all my most dearest who have held my worries with me for this week. And how, in amongst it, after the necessary words have been said, a laugh always carbonates herself amongst our insides.

I think it’s the most human of things, to find our happinesses this way.