Have you ever read “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” It’s about a woman suffering from a general malaise and lack of zest for life, which is the foundation for some cynical yet laugh-out-loud misadventures.
I was watching the movie the other night (not quite as good as the book), and was struck when Bernadette’s daughter (the narrator) says this:
“Have you ever heard that the brain is like a discounting mechanism? Say someone gives you a present and it’s a diamond necklace, and you open it and you love it. You're all happy at first, and then the next day it still makes you happy but a little bit less so. A year later you see the necklace and you think, ‘Oh that old thing.’
And you know why your brain discounts things? It's for survival. You need to be prepared for new experiences because they can signal danger. Wouldn't it be great if we could reset that since there aren't a lot of saber-tooth tigers jumping out at us? Seems like a design flaw that our brain's default setting signals danger and survival instead of something like joy or appreciation. Sometimes that's what I think happened to my mom. She got so focused on picking up danger signals that her discounting mechanism forgot to see all the good stuff in her life.”
I suppose it makes sense. There are all kinds of things our bodies do as a reaction to stress. Our heart beats faster, sending blood to our arms and legs and preparing us to fight or flee. We might sweat, making us more slippery and harder to catch. Or we might have to empty our bowels, making us faster. But the saber-tooth tiger is no longer the main source of our stress.
The stress that teachers and students feel today is sneakier, and more chronic. And the effects of that kind of stress don’t exactly serve a survival function. In fact, it’s the opposite. Lowered immune functioning, rise in blood pressure, trouble sleeping, a general malaise. Either way, the deck is stacked against joy.
So how do we fight thousands of years of evolutionary history to prioritize joy in our lives? The poet Jack Gilbert seemed to anticipate Bernadette’s trouble in his poem, “A Brief for the Defense.” In it, he writes,
We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Joy, after all, is deeply rooted in thousand-year-old spiritual traditions as well, and the evidence for its importance in our well-being is emerging from benchmark studies in positive psychology.
At a very basic level, joy is about opening and connection. Opening, in the sense that we’re available to receive joy. I remember last summer watching my kids have a water balloon fight, and mostly worrying about picking up all the rubber shards afterward. Contrast that with yesterday, when I was watching them shriek after each other, peels of laughter as the spray cooled them off on an 85-degree day. I’m not sure why I was open to joy yesterday but not last summer; the point is that joy is often there -- right there -- if we’re in a space where we can receive it.
And it’s about connection in the sense that we allow ourselves to get lost in something -- reading The Order of the Phoenix with my son, the curls of mist on an early morning run, my daughter finally making it up to the lowest branch on the tree, the crescendo of a Needtobreathe song.
So if joy isn’t something we find so much as something we allow, how do we prepare ourselves to allow it in? You probably won’t be too surprised to hear me say that a mindfulness practice can help. It doesn’t happen overnight, but allowing yourself to settle, allowing your reactivity to fade and your openness to the moment emerge, can allow joy in. And once we’re settled, we can connect more effortlessly to those moments where joy is present.
If we practice this during discrete moments, we cultivate a mindset that opens us to joy during moments when we’re not explicitly practicing. Just like any other growth that happens with a mindfulness practice, the foundation may be in the moments of intentional practice, but that foundation will gradually seep into your everyday experience.
Let’s start now with this practice. It’s based on a meditation from one of my favorite writers, Tim Desmond.
And stay tuned for next week’s post, where I’ll dive a little deeper into everyone’s favorite buzzword these days: gratitude.
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