Chip on My Shoulder: Joy and Adversity

I’ll be the first to admit it, I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to joy. Now, fun, I’m all about fun. I like blockbuster movies, I like amusement parks, I adore sledding and boat rides and water parks. But joy feels a little useless to me at times. Worse than useless. In my heart of hearts, I fear that joy is a tool used to make people feel more complacent when things in their lives are seriously screwed up. I think we’re often told to choose joy when really we should use our unhappiness to make changes. I think systems (and occasionally people) who hurt us use the glorification of joy as a way to prevent us from pushing back against serious problems.

I think that chip grew there when I misunderstood the point of joy. Joy isn’t there to solve our problems. It’s there to make life livable while we’re solving our problems. We are never going to run out of troubles. Even in the most luxurious of lives, there’s sickness, death and pain. And to overcome those, we’ll need a combination of resolve, ingenuity, and, occasionally, righteous anger. But we can’t live in that place. Resolve works for awhile but eventually we get tired out. Ingenuity can give us hope and motivation but we hit roadblocks from time to time. And righteous anger will burn on for a long time but if we’re not careful it can burn us up with it.

Joy isn’t there to make the bad things disappear. It works in the small moments, turning the bad into the tolerable and maybe even into the transformative. When Willow was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, there were a lot of bad things. She was three and we had to hurt her many times a day. It was terrible. But we learned to choose joy. What started out as dark jokes and gallows humor transformed rough moments into another part of our lives. It’s still not easy, but it is certainly tolerable and I hope one day transformative.

I don’t have such a chip on my shoulder about joy these days. I still look skeptically at anyone who tries to tell me how to feel about a situation. I wonder why it’s so important to them what I think. But joy has sustained me, even when anger threatened to consume me. It’s still the choice I am fortunate enough to make (almost) every day.

How has choosing joy transformed you? When has it not been enough?