Intentional Moments - the Road to Joy
Yesterday, I spent time with someone very important to me.
We don't get to spend a great deal of time together, because lifestyles and cultures seem to take us into different currents, and obligations that reach out to us from decisions made long ego sometimes prevent us from hanging out together. But yesterday, we got to spend several hours together.
As we were laughing together and enjoying each other's company, I realized something. This is joy; this intentional capturing of vignettes of time wherein deep, happy memories are crafted. Joy is seeing the smile on my friend's face; in hearing the laughter that shakes the shoulders. How unfortunate that we pursue other efforts: that we chase things like money and status and image instead of this profound joy.
And then I realized something else: it is likely that no one actually decides to not pursue the joy of intentional moments. It isn't as if we say: "you know, hey, I think I'd like to forsake happiness and meaning and instead pursue irrelevant, fleeting bullshit, the chase of which will ultimately lead to my very miserable end." If I'm wrong, and someone reading this consciously makes that choice, I will be happily corrected.
I believe instead we are lured toward these things by beautiful but subtly deceptive practices that entrance us: images in media upon which we have become utterly dependent. We must pursue wealth (under its definition of having money, that is) because we are told this is what counts. We must pursue physical beauty (under its definition of being thin and/or fit and/or androgynous) because we are told that this matters. We are not told that we must forsake happiness in the pursuit of these things; rather, we are told that these things are happiness, that joy is found in the pursuit (and of course, ultimate achievement of them).
So we chase these ideals. And yet there is proof that to value time over money leads to greater happiness. A 2018 article in the NY Times even demonstrates that prosperity - as defined by having more money and more stuff - has increased, but it has not led to a greater recognition of happiness. A 2017 study demonstrated that US happiness is declining, and also talks about how the crisis here is not a economic one, but a social one. Ironically, however, a social crisis is a crisis of economy, because the only real currency (one that isn't made up of a collective value upon which we all agree randomly, that is) is social value: how much do you love? how much time do you invest in your friends/family? That is the crisis - because I imagine that if such a thing were to be found in a truly independent study, the net value would be near zero, and we could then correlate this to the relative unhappiness and disillusionment found here in the West.
Happiness isn't the absence of sadness. There isn't a prescription available to make anyone happy. Pills offered here in the West (and I guess everywhere else by now) can only make you less depressed. But they can't make you happy. Why is that? Because happiness - deep joy - only comes with intentional living. It only comes with being awake for every minute, and not being swept up in meaningless frivolities, the images and marketing of which our modern media inundates us. We are tired; we have our intentional moments stolen from us by the unending chase of these deceptive (and ever elusive) concepts.
Joy - happiness, whatever you want to call it - still resides on the one thing that pills and media cannot give us: connection. We long to be deeply connected to one another. But connectedness comes only through intentional moments - moments where we appreciate the laugh of our friends, where we savor the time in union with them, and where we intentionally pause in our pursuit of temporal, fleeting details and instead connect with the Spirit.
This is the heart of native medicine.
This is the road to joy.
