Five Practices that Lend me Joy

Let's be real. Happiness is fickle.

Happiness is a lottery ticket. Happiness is a gold nugget that one out of a million forty-niners find. Happiness is a tempting prospect, but one that is far less than guaranteed.

And in reality, I don't care about it too much. I don't want a fleeting feeling of giddiness in my circumstance; I want a firm root: a knowledge that transcends the moment and ensures contentment regardless of my surroundings.

Now, that might just sound like I'm after permanent happiness, which I suppose it's true, but I think the important distinction to make comes in the connotation happiness holds (for me) that it's externally dependent. And, like I said, I don't want a variable emotion to give me highs in the high times and is nowhere to be found in the low. I want something more permanent. Something I can find within myself but is based outside of myself. Something that will give me happiness in the moment but will also guarantee I'll have it the next.

I want joy.

Here's five ways I've been cultivating it. Not finding it. Cultivating it. Because joy's not a treasure we stumble upon, it's one we grow.

If cultivating happiness were consistently betting on the lottery, cultivating joy is investing in a reliable asset. It may be slower, maybe less enticing or exciting, but it's a guarantee. A promise.

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1. I Pray

OKAY YES I KNOW I KNOW, just like last time, a Christian starting off with something Christian-ish. Big huge shocker again, but this blog is about me. Never fear, I'm not pressuring you to pray to a God you don't believe in.

But.

As far as my practice of cultivating joy, there's absolutely nothing that grows it more than cultivating my relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There's a reason for this, and it pertains to how I began: the contrast between happiness and joy. Joy is rooted in something beyond myself and my circumstances. That something is the eternal nature of God and what He's done for me in saving my soul eternally.

THAT is something that I can be happy in forever: in other words, it gives me joy.

The foremost way that I can come back to Jesus's sacrifice for me and the hope it gives for me to press on in this life is through prayer. When I pray, I can come to God as a helpless child to thank him (Colossians 4:2), praise him (Psalm 103:1-2), make requests of him (Philippians 4:6-7), and so on (if you want a model of prayer from Jesus himself, the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 is a great place to go).

Prayer anchors my soul in truth that is above my present circumstances: THAT'S how it gives me joy.

It reassures my soul of what I know: that I have a Good Father and a Great Savior.

"Please stop preaching at me."

Fine.

NUMBER TWO!

2. I Jam

Okay, this may seem like a MAJOR gearshift, but it may not be so unrelated as you think. Let me explain.

I've been talking about my joy needing to be rooted in truth, in immutable realities that transcend my own, and, yes, the biggest way that relates to me is in my relationship with God.

BUT.

I can also uncover similar truths and reminders in music that tell me to settle down; that give me perspective; that, sometimes, simply make me FEEL happy. Yes, I've said that feeling happy isn't the object of my pursuit, but it sure can help give me a boost sometimes.

In my last post, I detailed five such songs: songs that, while they might not necessarily make me feel happy in the moment, give me something much more important: perspective. And, at that, a longer-term perspective than just "I don't want to feel sad right now."

Now, it's not that I NEVER listen to songs with that sentiment in mind. Heck, if I'm in a simpy mood, sometimes I'll just listen to music thinking "I want to feel sad right now." That being said, if I'm cultivating joy, I want songs that give me healthy reminders that will ring as true tomorrow as they will today. Maybe they won't make me feel happy, but they'll help me think joyfully.

And once my thoughts are on a joyful track, my emotions can be, too.

NEXT.

3. I Read (and write)

I'm an English Major. That doesn't really seem like a very significant statement, but my road to get to it has been long and, at times, agonizing, and filled with far too much math. The amount of integrals I had to compute before realizing I didn't want to devote my life to them is kind of gross. That being said, just because English is my field of study doesn't necessitate its bringing my joy.

BUT!

I think that's just the point. This quarter I've finally arrived at a field that I can say genuinely brings me joy. Reading and writing help me introspect in a way I otherwise wouldn't. It's still stressful in the formal schoolwork aspect, sure, but it's no longer painful.

Reading is an invitation for me to absorb ideas, allow them to challenge and test my worldview, opinions, and biases, and writing provides the invitation to regurgitate an individualized version of them on paper.

Reading lets me be still, writing challenges me to not be too still, lest I slide into personal complacency.

Reading and writing are two sides of the coin of intellectual expression that I find necessary for my own sanity.

How do they cultivate joy in me? Simple. Actually, never mind. It's complicated. But I like saying "simple" after a rhetorical question; it makes me feel like I have all the answers.

In essence, reading and writing let me release all the burdens, thoughts, and emotions floating around in my psyche that sometimes I feel have enough energy to make my mind burst. Whether it's reading the Bible for my own spiritual growth or a novel like Tale of Two Cities for my English class; whether it's writing poetry, songs, or just jotting down little things to remember, reading and writing are two of the activities on here I find the most difficult and the most rewarding.

That was reaaaaaal convoluted. Oof.

But, to be fair, I said I like writing. Never said I was any good at it.

4. I Socialize (sometimes)

Now, I'm pretty sure you read "I Socialize" and, somewhere deep down, thought "well duh, don't we all kind of have to socialize at a university of 40 thousand million students?" And yes. True.

BUUUUUUUT.

Socializing hasn't always been a given for me, primarily because I'm a very introverted person: I feel far more comfortable spending time with myself than with a group of almost anybody. I get energy and joy from the things that I've listed above: prayer, music, reading, and writing...things I can do in solitude.

But, if I've learned one thing this last year, it's that while I may be introverted, I need extroversion to maintain balance and cultivate joyfulness. Because, whether I like it or not, without people, I lose my joy. And this happened in high school in a big way. During those four years, I struggled a huge amount with feelings of social inadequacy, neglect, and just overall loneliness: a sentiment that was part-bitterness at the social butterflies, part-toxic self-pity I used to justify my apathy with respect to exerting myself in society. Even with people who I would now consider friends, I would isolate myself and then suffer a lack of joy from being isolated.

Something I've seen the last year is that being drained of energy while surrounded by people I love is far, far better than being energized and lonely. My spiritual family in GOC (the Christian organization I spend a LOT of time with) have taught me that. They exemplify joy, love, and friendship for me, so that I can learn to practice them myself.

My philosophy of joy coming from constant things beyond myself breaks down in part here. Because people are, by nature, variable. We are inescapably flawed and changing, but there's something in the human experience that no human explanation can fully grasp: that we need each other.

Something about our flaws is assuaged when we encounter other flawed beings.

That's all there is to it. And it's a lesson I'm grateful to have learned.

5. I Don't Socialize (sometimes)

Okay yes Mason, ahahahaaaaa, very clever. This is where I have to decide whether to explain my stupidly un-witty inversion or leave the obvious obvious. You probably just want this thing to end already.

bUuuuUuuUuTttT I'm gonna explain anyways. Sorry.

As I said, I'm an introvert. Which means I like to be alone (yes, I just linked three different definitions of "introvert" (yes, I just linked a fourth)).

And I don't just mean "alone" in the contexts of prayer, jamming, reading, and writing. I simply mean the practice of contented solitude. Introversion and a disposition to FOMO aren't two characteristics that always coexist nicely, and I find that if I try to satiate one or the other constantly, I fall into disrepair. The solution? Well, to be completely honest, I tend to go to God in prayer and in the Bible, BUT I also think there is legitimate joy in learning how to be alone without being lonely.

This calls back to the idea that in order for joy to be joy, and not happiness, it has to endure in all climates of life: tHe StoRmS aNd SuNShiNe, as cliché would have it, or the loneliness and not-loneliness, as...this blog...would have it (yikes). Our lives are inescapably filled with loneliness; for a whooooole lot of the years of mine, I've let this loneliness conquer my emotions and drive me to think thoughts that are untrue and harmful.

What I'm suggesting, and what I think everyone needs, is not simply to try to avoid being physically isolated from others, but to learn to not translate that physical isolation to general isolation.

Because, the truth is, the presence of people doesn't necessarily prevent feeling alone, just like the absence of them doesn't necessarily imply it.

So I try to be alone without being lonely. I try to build joy by myself, so that when I do socialize (which I do, I promise), I can give that joy to others and receive it from them.

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Don't be happy.

Okay, that was a TERRIBLE conclusion, wow. Help.

*Don't JUST be happy. Don't settle for a fleeting emotion when you can aim for a lasting assurance of it. Aim for joy.

Because happiness is fickle. Let's be real.