Joy. Waiting to be filled. Right?

Don’t you put joy at like the TOP of the feellings spectrum? Wishing you a joyful holiday. Wishing you a life full of joy. Yes.

In my understanding of joy, there is ease. There is contentment. And there is serendipity. That sense of: this is the life I want to live. This life.

And the word, happiness too. Don’t you get ONE meaning? Smiles.

So when I went to read Arhundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness I thought – there has to be a reason for her title with that word, happiness, in it. I was expecting happiness with the American definition, I now realize. That thin meaning.

The book gives me so much joy. It gives me so much happiness. And, guess what? It has EVERYTHING in it: life that goes up and down. Deep love, deep loss. Kindness, cruelty. Depth, superficiality. There is no distinction, barriers, no fine line between what can be included and what is “not happiness”. It’s so exquisitely written that the art itself exudes that word. It’s a sense oh happiness that I might never have included.

Yet, life is like that right? It’s one thing. And then another.

At one point in the story, she asks this question: where do the birds go to die? And it baffled me. When I think of birds, they are flying, chirping, happy. What happens?

So when, right now, I think of joy, I see infinite possibilities. Good days, trying days, all kinds of days. What makes them joyful? It’s the book. It’s the art.

It’s the listening deeply to self, and not excluding anything. All part of how I am/one is. All part of the whole. Alive.

Deep joy.