Joy Makes Room for Happiness
Truly joyful people never miss an opportunity to have a good time.
There is something about being joyful, through and through, that makes a person more ready to participate in opportunities for happiness.
Joyful people pay attention for the good. They really make the spaces around them better.
They can go to dinner and actually be at dinner. They can attend a celebration and participate, fully, in the celebration. They can sit around a table with people they love and, with ease, make the atmosphere more enjoyable.
They don't just show up for the fun. They are an integral part of what makes those experiences delightful.
And I think there is a difference.
Because we tend to think that certain activities produce happiness. Vacations are fun. Parties are exciting. Restaurants are nice. Holidays are relaxing.
But none of those things guarantees that anyone will enjoy them.
You can put a person in the middle of a perfectly good time and they can remain almost completely untouched by it.
And you can put another person in a regular environment, in an ordinary moment, and somehow the space becomes more enjoyable just because they are there.
God-given joy has something to do with that.
It gives us the capacity to recognize opportunities, receive them and live in them when they come.
A lot of the time, we have this backwards.
We spend a lot of time trying to arrange circumstances that will make us happy without ever examining whether we are people capable of experiencing much happiness once we get there.
Because people who don't have much joy can still have a good time.
But they are much more dependent on things outside of themselves to create it.
And I think that dependence changes the way we enter these spaces.
When we come looking for an experience to make us happy, we need something from it.
And once we need something from it, we start paying attention to entirely different things.
Who is getting the attention?
Who seems happier than me?
Who has more?
Who looks better?
Who is being celebrated?
Are people impressed by me?
Are we having as good a time as everyone else seems to be having?
Something that was supposed to be an opportunity for delight can very quickly become an opportunity for comparison, competition, and one-upmanship.
This is what happens when we need experiences or people to do something for us that they were never capable of doing.
Instead of being open to just receive, we start measuring what we are getting and comparing.
And that makes it incredibly difficult to enjoy anything.
Walking joyfully into a room requires individuality. It requires the freedom to have your own experience without constantly measuring it against other people.
Joyful people bring that freedom with them.
They don't need to be the most interesting person at the table to enjoy the conversation. They don't need to have the best story to laugh at someone else's. Someone else's happiness doesn't diminish their own.
They are free not to compete.
And because they are free not to compete, they often add to the very happiness everyone else came looking for.
Going from one event to another looking for the next opportunity to feel good doesn't make for a joyful life long term.
I think we significantly overestimate what good circumstances are capable of doing for us.
We assume a good time is primarily the product of good circumstances when very often it is the product of being a person who knows how to have one.
That doesn't mean circumstances don't matter. There are situations that are just miserable. There are seasons where there simply isn't much to enjoy. And that’s okay. Because being joyful doesn't require us to pretend we’re happy all the time.
But even in difficult times, opportunities for happiness still come. Truly joyful people are more able to recognize them when they do.
They have a different perspective on life. They aren't just showing up for a good time, waiting to see if enough is happening around them to make them feel good.
They don't need every good moment to become something more than it is.
They are free to enjoy what is already there.
Free to add to it.
They bring joy with them.
And because they do, they make more of it available to everyone else.