Prompt #113: Joy and Delight
How do we reconcile our joy when it feels like the world outside is burning?
Hi Friends,
While it may seem frivolous to write about joy and delight when the world feels like a dangerous and frightening place, I would argue that this is the time to write about joy, to focus on delight and love to counter oppression and doom. The writer Audre Lorde says, “Joy, and celebration in particular, focus our attention on our commonalities, not our differences. In a world of turmoil, remember that joy is an act of resistance.”
I know it sometimes feels selfish to have fun: to experience delight, when others are suffering, but one of the ways we can offer our support and our empathy is to come from a place of hope, gratitude, and joy. By suppressing our own joy, we are not helping ourselves, nor are we helping others. Now is the time to find small joys, to delight in everyday moments. There will always be enough suffering, and the longer I live, the more I see that I must keep going in the face of both my own private sufferings, as well as witnessing the world’s many atrocities.
When my mother was dying of cancer and I moved in with her to take care of her, my small moments of delight came on my daily dog walks. I would have felt guilty, leaving my mother there to moan in agony (which she often did), with a stranger, a caregiver I’d hired, but my dog had to get out…at least that’s what I told myself, and even though I felt guilty at the time, I can now see that those moments enabled me to go back and take care of her, to help her face whatever there was the face—and with metastatic cancer, it was a lot.
There were times I left my mother for an hour or more, driving my dog out to the beach and laying there with him on the sand, listening to the ocean, and crying (which was something I was not allowed to do in front of my mother). I would delight in the warmth of the winter sun, the sound of the crashing waves, the taste of salt in the air. And I would feel sheepish because I was enjoying myself, albeit briefly, while my mother was suffering.
But I always returned from these brief outings, better able to care for my mother because I had allowed some joy in. We are far better equipped to handle a difficult world if we also allow ourselves moments of delight; we can face the darkness (and help others face it, too) if we bring within us some light.
I have a friend who’s working on a series of poems that she’s calling “Cancer can be funny.” She has brain cancer and has been navigating the healthcare wind tunnel for quite some time. I believe her survival has hinged on her ability to laugh, to find the moments of delight in even the very worst circumstances.
For this week’s writing prompt, we’re going to find the joy, even if we feel uncomfortable about doing so—my best writing has always come from writing into the discomfort. So this week, we’re going to interrogate (and celebrate) those moments of delight, especially when they interrupt the hardest things we’ve ever had to confront (or in the case of fiction—the hardest things our characters must face).