Morning Desolation
A change of pace.
Whether or not it’s true, I see myself as a depressive personality. I am a realist, but realism begets pessimism. Finding joy is difficult when you look at the big picture.
Yes, every day children are born and love flourishes. But every day hearts are broken and children die - of starvation, preventable diseases, war. Humans are the cause of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years. We’ve left the planet teetering on the edge of unpreventable environmental disaster. Reasons to be happy are far outnumbered by reasons to despair. It’s hard to plan for a future when you don’t believe there will be one.
One birthday, at a time when everything was perfect in my life, I spent the daylight hours trapped between anger and tears, unable to leave bed until the afternoon. I was frustrated by the sheer blindness of humanity, the inability of so many people to care about anything more than themselves. That day, I was saved by dedicated friendship and takoyaki. On other days it’s other things.
Somehow, despite everything, happiness creeps in. It’s as essential to existence as it is unexpected. I had the fortune of experiencing a taste of that euphoria on saturday, fighting off the remains of a minor hangover, blinking at the sun in a bus shuttling me to Burnaby. It was the best I’d felt in months. I locked onto the feeling, seared it into my brain. The problems of the world were no less. They hadn’t left my mind, and I cared no less passionately about them - but nothing could upset me. Not the thicket of parked cars, nor the poisonous consumerism that hummed in the mall in which I found myself. In times of future despair, I will summon that memory, remember why joy had returned.
So where did it come from? The concert I’d been to two nights before? The drinking and long-missed friendship from the previous evening? The sun? The egg-on-toast breakfast? The anticipation of seeing another friend and helping her move to a new home? Everything, to be sure. I contemplated that warm happiness, but it wasn’t diminished by the exercise.
Joy comes in possibilities. The world might end (not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a long, drawn-out moan), but it is within our capabilities to prevent it. Since the past few decades, and for the first time in human existence, there exist the means to provide every basic necessity of life to every living person. That society is structured in a way directly opposed to that provision is an obstacle, but the possibility alone brings hope. That compassion exists at all is reason enough to fight for the continuation of the human experiment.
Joy must be cultivated and maintained. This is difficult, and I am a novice. To be bitter, grumpy, or despairing comes easily, but it fatigues and cripples when sustained. A world-weary fighter is easy to defeat, a happy one is a resilient enigma. Being joyful does not preclude struggle or seriousness, nor does it require ignoring others or accepting the world as it is. Indeed, the world today is completely unacceptable. The world is repugnant, sick, dying. It doesn’t have to be. This is where we will derive our fuel.
We need an army of jocular warriors, conscientious and serious and observant. The big picture never leaves their minds, the fine details are not forgotten. Despair is not ignored or suppressed, but accepted. It becomes an ally, a motivator, the very reason to be joyful. Training begins now. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that happiness is a weapon?
(In related news, I think I’m finally starting to understand Paul Tillich.)