Capacity For Joy

Joy is an impression of pleasures, that is, a sense of present pleasures, a recollection of past pleasures, and a hope of future ones.-Leibniz


The best thing about humanity can also be the worst thing about humanity--we are self-aware.



It is great in that we can tune that awareness across a broad range.  When things are good, we can tune into that--when they are not good, we can tune things out.

Of course the downside is that unlike a hyena, you cannot sit back and laugh at the ugliest things you see.  You recognize that in anything you don't take part in, your part is bystander--or maybe accomplice.  For a bleeding-heart like me, it can sometimes weigh you down.  I am afforded the luxury right now of sitting in relative comfort typing away on a laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet, listening to Cake while hapless other world citizens are climbing out of rubble, starving, or being initiated as soldiers in drug-war-fueled child armies.  

Were a hyena capable of being taught English, how would you explain Prozac, self-esteem or depression to it?  These things only make sense in the context of self-awareness and the human ability to 'decide' how to interpret the stimulus it is presented with.  But your range is something you develop and have to work to increase.  I like to think of it as your 'capacity for joy'.  In a lot of ways, tuning out the bad and tuning in to the good is really what it is all about.  If you want things to suck right now, it is easy to think of the world in a way that will accommodate that--and vice versa.

There is only so much joy available to you today.  And we all have a limitation to absorb our daily joy possibilities--I think most of us realize this.  How much you channel in a day is simply some measure of your ability to process happiness--I don't think it has much to do with externals, except for maybe the most extreme of circumstances.  If you are in the right mindset for something in a moment, can you not get higher from an event/news,etc than if you received the news from a lower starting point?  Think about your mindset as a stock price rising and falling throughout the day, minute by minute.  As news hits, it runs through the filter of the current price and its impact will be amplified/muted by this.

So then it follows for me, if you want to be 'happier' you simply need to work towards expanding your personal capacity for joy.  The world is your oyster, asshole.  I believe it was Carl Weathers in the golf documentary 'Happy Gilmore' that coined the phrase 'Go to your special happy place'.

The more you work to focus on the good signals the happier you will be.  If you don't believe in the power of positive thinking, do yourself a favor and work on it.