Journey to Joy
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I found myself, once again, marveling at the little squares of energy, experience, and honed skillsets that smiled back at me from my computer screen. Usually just five of us, but only four today. As women, we are eager to share, to lift each other up, and to chart a course to travel together.
I’ve reached a stage in my life where a “meet-up” like this no longer loads me with self-doubt. Did I say too much? Was my body language off? Did I listen enough? Do I even deserve to be here? I just let myself presume welcome and soak up the good intentions.
We climb an orderly ladder of age, close on the rungs, I assume, except for one that lags a bit behind—but almost a grandmother. After discussing possible projects, the conversation turns to other topics as we close. A comment jumps out at me: “8:00 o’clock at night? That's when I am ready to head to bed with my cup of tea and a good book.” I smile as my heart swells in a kindred joy.
Since I have retired, almost every Friday evening at 8:00 I head up to bed, cup of tea in hand, tune in to Ray Vega’s Friday Night Jazz Party on my local public radio station, and settle into bed with a book that has called my name all day. The complex rhythms form the soundtrack to the plot. Sometimes I might turn down the sound to concentrate on a character’s actions or to capture a quote on a post-it. Other times I might rest the book on the bed and lounge in the pure cool of Chet Baker’s trumpet or John Coltrane’s sax. That Friday ritual? That is joy.
As I wind down the decade of my sixties, joy has become an amalgam of happiness, awe, delight, pleasure, gratitude, connection, and comfort. What brings me joy has significantly evolved over time. It’s actually been a lifelong journey to get to joy.
When I was younger, I don’t know if I even could recognize what I experience now as joy. When I was very young, it was fun that I chased. As I grew and matured, I sought happiness. But mostly what I remember from childhood were many things that were not fun. And as I became an adult, I remember saying through the decades that, well, I just wasn’t happy. Gosh, why would I be? Most of my relationships were strained by trauma and fraught with dysfunction. I could barely recognize any joy that crept into my own life. But I sure could recognize people whose function was to suck the air out of it if it dared appear. It seems I often invited people into my life who could expertly deflate an already flagging balloon with one withering look.
Throwing myself into my work was my answer to anything uncomfortable. Maybe happiness was highly overrated, at least I tried to convince myself it was. But achievement? Productivity? Accomplishment? Maybe those things didn’t inspire the poets, but they hooked me. What I could feel definitely was not joy, but it still packed thrill. It was a victory of self. It was pure adrenaline.
One time I remember I’d run a week of inservice training for a group of teachers who did not want a lot of what was on the agenda. I managed to pull it off and win most of the staff over just in time to hurry off to a weekend wedding. A fellow administrator was one of the guests, and I could see the shock register on his face when he saw that I was the wedding officiant. “Is there anything you can’t do?” he said to me after the ceremony. And there it was again. Not joy, but that rush of adrenaline. “I am what I do.”
I am nothing if not eternally grateful to have met my husband at fifty. It was the catalyst for breaking those cycles of chasing recognition as self-worth and its not an understatement to say it turned my life around. With him, I began to experience safety, unconditional love and worth, more laughter and fun than I’d even known, true happiness, and most importantly, the prelude to the joy I now know each day.
In my sixties I have moved from “I am what I do” to “a state of being”: enjoyment. The verb enjoy, thanks to its prefix, literally means “to be in joy.” That’s mostly how I feel now. Oh there are still stressors, problems, and worries – some so big they could crush joy into despair. But they don’t. If the problems are bigger, so are the strategies to cope with them as you age. You have a lifetime of navigation tools and instruments that finally come together to serve the journey into aging–and you have the patience and wisdom to use them to transcend the killjoys, the buzz kills, and the contemporary robber-barons. Of course there is sadness and suffering, in our country and the world, right in your own peer group, perhaps in your own life. But there is also an expansively gentle and wise understanding that all you have loved in a lifetime cannot be negated by the specter of potential loss. In your sixties and beyond, the waning of time marries the waxing of space. In this abbreviated time of life, there is ample room for what brings you joy.
So, here’s the proclamation for aging women in their sixties and beyond. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is joy. Here are your instructions: Lose yourself in your joy. Let joy resonate deeply into your bones. And be aware at this time in life, joy will come softly, just as the poets said it would. It will come with the muted crunch of gravel under your shoes as you walk along your favorite path in the afternoon. It will come near dusk as the cattails bloom softly. It will come in a sudden cacophony of the red-winged blackbirds’ nasal notes, the raspy squawks of a plague of grackles, and the deep croaking of frogs near the marshy patch in a field. It will come with the coolness of damp green grass against the back of your head as you gaze up at a meteor shower against the backdrop of a vast night sky in August. It will come in the garden as you notice a long-lost hollyhock crowding its way back between a stand of Carolina bushpeas and a tower of summer phlox. It will come during that first meditative cup of morning coffee, sipped in solitude outside in the warm sun. It will come through a nod and a smile across a room from someone you dearly love. It will come within the scent of the mock orange wafting over your shoulder as the urgent scrawl of a fast-moving pen fills the lines of your journal. It will come on the lips of a heartfelt and relieved thank you from a friend. It will come in the company of some wise, later-life-ladies. Oh yes, and one more. It will most definitely come on a Friday night, with a cup of tea, a good book, and a lullaby of some smooth jazz.
It will come. Joy will come.
