How odd it must seem to start this blog with what seems like a contradiction to the title of the previous blog, “It’s All About Hurt.” All about hurt? Not all about hurt? What am I trying to say? I am saying that both are true, however paradoxical that sounds. In Feelings 6 we talked about the centrality of hurt, something that began to talk about in Feelings 2. If we knew how to process hurt, we would reduce wars and divorces to a minimum and reduce arguments to zero. Yes, hurt is very central in the business of human relationships, and I work diligently to help people understand hurt and effectively process it. The centrality of hurt that we discussed in the previous blog has to do with the origin of hurt. Hurt always originates from love. We can’t prevent hurt and we don’t want to prevent hurt. Why? Because without hurt we would have no improvement, no excellence, to success because all of these important matters of life depend on being hurt, recognizing that we have been hurt because we have lost something that we love, and then becoming better as a result of this lost love. So, we begin the current discussion by affirming that hurt is a central ingredient in life and that we have to recognize it, understand it, resolve it, and learn from it.
This is the seventh blog about feelings, and it is feelings that drive us, however impossible it is for us to define “feelings.” Hurt, and the emotion of sadness that is the core of hurt, is an important feeling but it is not the most important feeling we have. It is just the most difficult one, at least in this North American culture. Recall from Feelings 1 that there are two basic feelings that erupt from love: joy and sadness. If you want to improve your emotional and interpersonal life, you need to recognize and value both joy and sadness. In our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, we talk about the importance of sadness. But joy is equally important. If you want to have a fulfilling life, you need to learn how to express joy at least as much as you express sadness. Learning how to express joy, the practice of it, is just as important as learning and practicing hurt
We have spent a lot of time in the last blog on defining and discussing hurt. Now we want to define and discuss joy. And even though it might seem peculiar, many people do not know how to really engage and express their joy.
Joy
All four basic emotions have to do with love. Joy is the feeling of having something, whereas sadness is the feeling of losing something, anger the feeling of having lost many things, and fear the feeling of potentially losing something. There are many forms of love, perhaps as many as there are experiences in life, but it is the experience of loving something that we call joy. If we love something, the loving of this something causes joy in our lives. But everything we love we eventually lose, so it is important to know both the emotions of joy and sadness that always accompany love. We will lose the people we love, the property we love, and the ideas we love…eventually. The fact that we will eventually lose something that we love should not keep us from loving, but it often does. The only way we can protect ourselves from feeling hurt and sadness is to avoid loving something. But in avoiding sadness, we also avoid joy. If we are going to love something, we need to experience the joy of having this something as well as allow for the process of feeling sad when we lose this something. Joy and sadness are companions in life as we love, lose, and love again.
We previously discussed the emotion of sadness that accompanies hurt. In this and following blogs we want to begin to discuss the other half of love: joy. As we go forward with this discussion, note how often you have some form of joy in your daily life and then note how often you express this feeling. If you really want to enhance life, you will get better at expressing the joys you have in life. Sometimes joy is a simple, indescribable, ineffable experience like Deb and I had the night before I wrote these words. We were sitting on our dock “up north” at our cabin in the waning dusk of the day and saw three loons pass in front of us just a few meters away, seemingly completely disregarding our presence. We had earlier seen two other loons that day and thought that this group of three might be the brood now on their own. We just watched as the three took turns diving into the water only to surface some 100 meters away barely visible in the dusk. This was one of those ineffable experiences that brought a sense of joy that was multifaceted: we felt a peacefulness, a connection with nature and a felt sense of gratitude as well. (Watch for Deb’s forthcoming blog on Grieving Loons) The moment passed quickly but the memory stayed. It was a moment of genuine joy.
Wondrous as the loon experience was last night I remember a time some years ago when a severe storm damaged the loon nest that was situated on the island just across from us on our little lake. Lost to mother and father loon were their young ones, and we heard the most woeful waling of the loons for several hours. They had loved their little ones and now they had lost them. These two very different experiences with Nature showed us how joy and sadness are intrinsically related to love. In this series on Feelings we have previously focused on the hurt, sadness, and relational difficulties that result from loss. The feeling of joy could come like it did last night, simple and wondrous, but it can come in many other forms, times, and places. We want to turn our attention to the other half of the love phenomenon, the joy of loving something, which means the joy of having something. In forthcoming blogs we will be discussing:
- How we experience joy in our five senses
- How we experience joy in our sixth sense, which we might call intuition
- How we experience joy with people
- How we experience joy alone
- How we experience joy with property
- How we experience joy with ideas, hopes, dreams, and plans
- How we express the feeling of joy in each of these experiences
Consider your own experiences and expressions of joy as we explore this important emotion. And as always, please feel free to comment, correct, or otherwise add to this and all our blogs. It is a pleasure to be of service.
Further Reading
Previous Feelings blogs
Forthcoming Feelings blogs on joy
West, M. (2007). Feeling, being, and the sense of self. London: Karnac
Damasaio, A. (2003). Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. New York: Harcourt Books.