Find what brings you joy…

What brings you joy?

Someone asked me this question today, after what has admittedly been one of the worst few weeks I’ve ever had. I had to stop for a few moments and ponder the question.

According to Merriam-Webster, Joy is the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires, the expression or exhibition of such emotion, a state of happiness or felicity, or a source or cause of delight. The question, however, was not what is joy, but what brings you joy?

I have known joy, although at a different times in my life it has been illusive at best. I struggle with remembering joyful times, as sorrow and grief seem to be more substantial emotions and easier, for lack of a better term, to hold on to.

I have sorrow, mostly centering around one particular person and the ending of a relationship that is exquisitely painful to think about. Each and every day I struggle with the loss of this relationship, while trying to find comfort in the love that I know existed then, and remains constant even now.

In discussion with a chaplain friend, he challenged me to find what brings me joy– something completely selfish, in many respects. How do you find what brings you joy?

As I write this, Cathie Ryan is singing a beautiful song called, “Be Like the Sea”

It matters nothing what they did to you
The storm is over, the wreckage through
Leave them in your wake, no more for you to take
Be like the sea

If it hurts your heart, cast it up on the shore
Let it go forever, ceart go leor
Wash away the sorrow, the tears of no tomorrow
Be like the sea

If it hurts your heart, cast it up on the shore.   What profound words, really~ to take what has been hurting you and to let it go, to throw it from you, where it can be moved and buried with the tide.  Little by little, sharp edges become dull by the movement of sand and of water.  I don’t think the pain ever completely goes away, but perhaps the burden of it becomes easier to carry.

Perhaps the only way that one can find what brings them joy is to realize, and accept, what brings them sorrow.