“Joy: a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” Oxford English Dictionary

Spring is my second favorite season.  Finally, winter is passing. The longer, warmer days, bird calls, green shoots, blossoms’ fragrance … all remind me of renewal and rejuvenation, and bring me joy. 

I’ve had to learn to cultivate joy.  Growing up in my WASP family, joy was a suspect emotion: too unrestrained, and thus unseemly.   I remember my surprise, when I learned my fellow Episcopal parishioner, a proper, conservative, tweed-dressed, Boston trust and estates lawyer, had a personal motto “Choose Joy!”

Poet Ross Gay provides a perspective on cultivating joy in his last two books, “The Book of Delights” and the “Catalog of Unabashed [Gratitude].” Gay states that “joy is the moments… when my alienation from people — but not just people, from the whole thing — it goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous. And I love that mycelium, forest metaphor, that there’s this thing connecting us. And that thing connecting us is that we have this common experience… that we are not here forever. And that’s a joining — a “joy-ning… It is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”

Advances in cognitive neurobiology give us a new appreciation of our brain’s plasticity. Instead of what many of us believed, that our brains stopped forming at some point when we were young adults, it turns out that our brains form and can change across the lifespan.  And what we practice, we become — that we can change our brains through our behavior: we can deliberately, successfully cultivate attitudes like gratitude, wonder, and compassion. Why not cultivate joy?

Sam Thayer

Chaplain, Desert Regional Hospital; Member, St. Paul’s of the Desert