“Our brightest blazes
of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.”
Samuel Johnson
Today
we touch on yet another one of Han Yu’s seven constituents of our emotional
make-up: JOY. What is joy? It is a feeling of great happiness, of great pleasure.
In his “Ode to Joy”, Friedrich von Schiller wrote that joy is the
beautiful radiance of the gods, the daughter of Elysium (in Greek mythology the
home of the blessed after death), whose charms reunite what common use has
harshly divided. All men, he wrote, become brothers under her tender wing, and
that includes all our sisters as well.
How beautiful, and how true the ability
of joy to reunite humans. As Mark Twain said, grief can take care of itself,
but to get the full value of joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.
Only in sharing joy can we truly experience its reviving and reuniting
capacity. Grief is an integral part of our lives, but we should not be governed
by grief. Nonetheless, grief helps us to appreciate joy. How would we have known
the existence of joy, if we did not know grief and sadness, and vice-versa?
It
is much better to let joy be our guiding light, the sun of our enlightenment,
the fountain to nourish the lives we live. Do not let your joys, like your grief,
be silent in nature. Jalaluddin Rumi says that when you do things from your
soul, you feel a river moving in you, a river of joy. Embrace joy, every day,
for there are so many things to be joyful about.
He who binds to
himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake
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