I Might Have Found The Joy Formula!
It's something to do with leaving a career.
I might have been 50% rioja by this stage, or maybe I was still in a state of wonder due to that awe-inspiring first glimpse of the Sagrada Familia or warmed up inside by the lovely, retired couple from Dallas who told us about their extensive travels around Spain, waxed lyrically about IRE-LAND especially DON-EE-GAWL and took the most beautiful photo of us on our group tour of Park Güell1. But as I sat in a crowded tapas bar surrounded by the five difficult people I see every day, shoving the most amazing patatas bravas into my mouth, I felt an intense feeling of extreme delight, a lightness in my spirit. I needed to share this moment so I clutched my hand passionately to my chest, paused the conversation and made a dramatic speech about how much I loved everyone. There were looks of horror, the odd squirm. “Mummy, please don’t cry,” said Ella. “Not here”.
The same thing happened to me again just over a week later. Courtesy of a gift from a good friend, I’d enjoyed a relaxing overnight stay in a hotel near the sea with three of my daughters. I’d watched weddings out the window, eaten a scone with jam and cream, admired the Mountains of Mourne and gone misty-eyed when Lucy ordered her lamb medium-rare. As we left, there was bird poo all over my car due to parking in a slightly unfortunate spot but I was still in a zen-like state following a morning swim to the sound of panpipes. I’d spontaneously picked up a plant, some deluxe carpaccio di bresaola, marinated gravadlax salmon and a ciabatta. “Mummy is really enjoying this,” said Lydia. We’d only popped in to buy a bag of peach rings2 but I felt the same feeling again. But I wasn’t in Barcelona, I was in LIDL.
It was all very strange. What was this feeling? I’d noticed it happening more and more. There were many examples - the bubbles in the first glass of Crémant, the post-run euphoria, the appeal of a germinating idea, the stillness of a Spring evening, the confirmation when booking a restaurant, the anticipation of a Sunday roast. It was fleeting but powerful, elusive but achievable. Was I experiencing a spiritual awakening, the presence of God in strange places or was it just plain, old joy? I decided to explore what was happening. I turned to Google. This left me confused and frustrated, down a rabbit hole of definitions. Happiness, joy, satisfaction - they were hard to define. Some said they were feelings, others’ emotions. The difference between feelings and emotions was nebulous, something to do with cortical regions of the brain. I discoveredfeelings have to be triggered by an external motivating factor whereas emotions can be completely internalised. I learned that satisfaction is the pleasure that comes from fulfilling wishes and desires, that happiness is based on what is happening around us but joy is based on what is happening within us. I had no idea what that meant.
I read that joy was a feeling that came from an overall sense of wellbeing. It could be passive, either peace and contentment with accepting things as they are or active, based on an intense engagement with the environment. I was dismayed at how much people base their levels of happiness on reaching destinations, realising objectives, meeting end-goals. Not reaching those self-imposed expectations has a profound impact on happiness. The formula for happiness = reality – expectations. But that takes no account of the pleasures or privileges of that reality. Joy, on the other hand, carries no burden of expectations. As a state of mind, it also transcends reality.
In all of my (ten-minute) research, there was one statement that jumped out at me. It said that joy increases energy, confidence and self-esteem. Therefore, it was important to cultivate it, exercise the joy muscle, note when joy is present, store those memories and find ways to re-create it, re-capture that feeling. We all need more joy.
A couple of weeks before the trip to Barcelona and then experiencing the presence of God in a supermarket in County Down, I had written about having an identity crisis, multiple ones in fact. I was working my way through my latest one which involved stepping out of a career and no longer having a title, a position, a role to define myself by. It was disorientating. I had mentioned Jackie who was having an even worse identity crisis than me. At forty-two, she’d already completed the usual ‘checklist of life’. She was asking was this it. She had lost her joy.
There was a response to my piece, a comment shared online. The writer had lost her joy too. She too, was working with a coach to try to find it again. This made me sad. I know her well and her vitality, her zest for life, her love of travel, her huge and abundant heart has always inspired me. She is fearless, intrepid, someone whose life I have occasionally been semi-jealous of. How could she have lost her joy? I wanted to help her, give her a magic formula to get it back.
I picked up the next two issues of the magazine that had featured Jackie’s story. There was a second and then a third update on her. Her life had gone bananas. The coach was panicking, arranging a session with her supervisor to make sure she hadn’t set Jackie on the path to self-destruction. Jackie had made hugely life-changing plans. Thankfully, she was keeping her husband but she was selling her house, cashing in her assets, and moving half-way across England to set up a glamping site on an abandoned piece of land. The coach had expressed alarm at such risk-taking. Now, she was worried she had lost her objectivity and non-judgemental approach. It wasn’t up to her to stop Jackie running away from an old life and creating a new one.
Jackie was desperate to find joy. She was excited about locating it in another part of the country. This made me even more confused. Circumstantially, my life is much the same as it always was - I live in the same house, I still have the same children, the same husband, my financial circumstances remain stable, I have the odd new friend. Yet… I feel so completely different and somehow, so much more apparently joyful. All I have done is leave my job.
And then three things happened that helped me piece it all much better together. It made me realise leaving a job was what had changed everything really.
1. Firstly, I was sent a series of audio clips to listen to. The man spoke very slowly, deliberately slowly. He said understanding would be enhanced by the intentionally slow pace. It was the perfect antidote to my usual frenzied attempts to listen to multiple podcasts at 1.5 speed. I was forced to listen carefully. I couldn’t speed him up. The audio discussed life versus the game of life3. It described how so many of us get life wrong because we forget we are playing a game. He explained how living is continuous. It is your capacity for happiness, satisfaction and joy. It could be described as your psychological digestive system. Ideally like gaining one unit of nutrition from one unit of food in the standard digestive system, in the psychological digestive system, from one unit of life experience, you would hope to get one unit of satisfaction. But you can get unlimited satisfaction from one unit of life experience if you choose. That is called a peak life experience. That is joy. And this unfortunately is the thing people have the most trouble with. They stop embracing the natural journey of life, as they go along and instead focus on the artificial game of life, the voluntary constraints and challenges that supposedly help them develop as a person, the targets and goals they have set for themselves. And they base their joy on the results of that. Although, you can get temporary moments of satisfaction in the game of life from achievements, you can’t get lasting happiness. The man with the slow voice concluded by explaining that since there is no lasting satisfaction in the game of life, from accomplishments and validations, you could choose instead to be good at life, at just living. I realised by stepping out of my job, I have stepped out of the game of life, for now at least. I have chosen to be good at living. I see the world in a completely different way. I have nothing artificial to strive towards.
2. Then, I listened to a podcast about fun4. I heard about how children have an endless capacity for fun but then depressingly and gradually, they lose this capacity as they approach adulthood. Making space to have fun in our lives becomes secondary to succeeding in the game of life. Fun is not silliness – it is playful, connected flow - a combination of playfulness (a light-hearted attitude and not caring too much about the outcome), connection (with other human beings or experiences) and flow (so actively engaged in an activity that you lose track of the passage of time). Each on their own holds value but together, they bring wonder and joy. Because I have left a career, I now have more time for fun – every day, I have wonderful opportunities for playfulness, connection and flow.
3. Finally, I read an article about how a non-busy life doesn’t have to be a boring life5. I’ll be honest. For most of the last nine months, I have worried that my life holds no value because I am no longer an employee, part of an organisation or validated by a salary. Like the author of this piece, for a long time, I believed that I needed to be busy in order to affirm my existence. And like the author too, I discovered that although I was busy, I was also bored, bored of the repetitiveness, the daily grind, the weekly and the weekend commitments. Leaving a career has offered me the opportunity to live a simpler life, one that revolves around those activities that truly bring me joy – writing, reading, socialising, eating, exercising.
In theory, joy is there for our taking yet we choose to consistently ignore it because we are so caught up in our false interpretation of the game of life. We continue to look for happiness in all the wrong places.
And so, in conclusion with more to explore in due course, I offer my formula for joy, especially for my friend, who may temporarily have lost hers.
Joy = Living (+/- Results of Game of Life) – Busyness + Fun
Let me know if you try this formula and it works!!
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I will forever think of them when I look at that photo.
They’re sweets.
George Pransky – The Game of Life and Living