I had completed my walk shortly after the sun rose. It was a brisk morning with the windchill ten degrees below freezing. When I looked out the back window, I saw ten or twelve sparrows, each sitting on the outer twigs of the branches of the juniper in which they had roosted for the night. They had positioned themselves so they could warm up in the first rays of morning sunlight before visiting the nearby feeder.
I had not noticed this behavior before that day. I suspect it repeats regularly during the cold days of winter. This time, though, I was there to see it. For the few moments I stood there, I marveled at how this little piece of the natural world works.
I was reminded as well of watching sparrows, in the morning light of a summer day, feeding on the insects that had been attracted by the light of a mercury vapor light above the door on my garage. I have since removed this light, saving energy, but depriving me of any opportunity to witness this frenzy a second time.
There is a fair amount of ordinariness to life. This is, without doubt, a good thing. Most of us would fare poorly if we lived on the brink of uncertainty much of the time. We look for patterns in our comings and goings and will work to create them when they are absent. This tendency, though, can rob us of moments of joy because we are not accustomed to looking for them.
I think of joy as a catch-all term used to group experiences, such as delight, awe, and wonder, that generate positive emotions. Those experiences are often momentary and frequently the result of serendipity. Living well requires appreciating those moments, capturing them in our minds so that they do not pass by unnoticed, and so we can experience joy again through memory. In much the same way that a humdrum life can lead to tuning out delight, awe, and wonder, a life well lived can be one that includes an expectation that serendipitous occurrences await us at every turn if we will only take time to notice and appreciate them.
What is needed are distractions. As I type this, I hear the sound of a train's horn as it approaches the street crossings in the city where I live. This happens dozens of times each day but I rarely hear it. It is so common that it has become a part of the background noise of everyday life for me. This time, however, because I had paused in my typing, I could let it distract me, along with the rain drops hitting the roof above my second floor home office. Paying attention requires that I pause what I am doing and use senses I had focused almost entirely on this article.
As we leave behind our childhoods, we become more adept at keeping our fixing our gaze on what is directly in front of us. This is helpful most of the time. It lets us accomplish things necessary to the good life. The danger is that we can become so single-minded in this pursuit that we miss out on a fuller experience of the world outside ourselves that can be a source of joy and a respite from the demands of daily life. Those experiences can refresh us if we just know where and to look and listen.
If we want moments of joy, we need build distractions into our lives. One way to do this is to shift our focus from what is directly in front of us to what is above us, beside us, behind us, and below us. I never tire of watching turkey vultures circle on the thermals in the heat of summer's later afternoons as they search for where they will roost for the night. I like to think they do it because they find pleasure in it, not just because of instinct. If I am not looking up in the sky I will miss this spectacle and the delight and wonder that I experience because of it. The last few mornings, when the sky was clear, I spotted Venus in the east because I made the effort to look.
Those who attend religious services should expect to find delight in the community they find in the house of worship and in the awe and wonder that results from an encounter with the divine. To do so requires that they leave at the door of the church or synagogue or mosque the everyday things that filled their minds before they arrived. They must clear a path for joy to find them.
Living well means living in the expectation that joy abounds if I prepare myself for it. Living well also means that I should expect moments of sorrow.
I do not need to look for sorrow. It will find me. The effect it can have on me when it does can be mitigated to some extent if I am prepared for it, if I acknowledge that sorrow is a fact of life.
It does no good, when encountering disease, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, financial difficulties, divorce, and countless other sources of sorrow, to complain that life is not fair. Life is neither fair nor unfair. It was not designed for our benefit. It just happens. As a consequence, it makes sense to expect moments of sorrow to occur.
In fact, we should be thankful they do. What kind of people would we be if negative turns of events generated no tears or anguish? The emotions we experience are reminders of our humanity. We cannot control these reactions; we can control our responses.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. — Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The causes of our sorrows need not consume us, diverting us from the path to the good life. Neither does it mean that we live well despite sorrow. There is a middle course, one which acknowledges that bad things happen to good people. We adjust and adapt, incorporating the sorrow of new realities into our lives. We chose how we respond.
There are preparations we can make that will aid us. Some of those were the subject of last week's article about refining habits of character. The inner strength we gain by doing so is a resource on which we can draw as we find our way forward in the face of the fiercest of headwinds.
Equally important is to live our lives with the expectation that we will suffer losses at times. We must not think that suffering is something that happens to other people. I have first-hand experience that this is not the case. We need not approach life in trepidation, however, but rather in the certain knowledge that, in nearly every instance, we can expand our image of a life well lived to include sorrow as well as joy.