Small Joys, Everywhere

A story in an article I read about Fred Rogers--that's The Mr. Rogers--talked about his reaction to one of the school shootings a few years ago. He had heard that the two students who engaged in the shootings told friends and acquaintances they were going to do "something big," that "something big was about to happen."

And Mr. Rogers, being Mr. Rogers and able to invert things and look at them upside down and sideways and inside out, wondered how things might have turned out differently if the two boys had focused on doing something little.

For some reason, that story came to mind when I talked to my wife last night about this weblog. I had received responses recently from several people about the sadness and melancholy of its tone. I don't take those responses--and I don't think they were intended--as criticism; I've thought about the issue myself. Do I think too much about the sadness and suffering in the world? Do I pay too much attention to pain?

In a way, I think the answer is yes, but not because sadness is all I see. I have always had a contrary tendency to look at the things that make other people want to look away, and to turn my head from the things that everyone points to and shouts about. I refuse to rubberneck at accidents, and for years I avoided seeing E.T. because everyone talked about how wonderful it was.

In part that comes from being a black American and Catholic, which means having to develop a kind of counter-history. For example, when people talk about "the good old days," I always had to ask myself who they were good for. In part it comes from being a younger sibling in a family in turmoil, in which hard truths about things were never faced and talked about.

But also, I think it comes from living in a culture that doesn't seem to understand the relative values of big and little, that doesn't understand the difference between joy and happiness. We seem to pursue Happiness as though it were a big prize, to be purchased like a new SUV or won like a lottery jackpot. I engage in this too much myself. I think about the amount of money I'd like to make, the work I'd like to do, the house I'd like to have, and I can easily trick myself into believing that possession of those things will make me Happy. I can start to imagine that merely living in the presence of those things will give my spirit ease.

Joy, though, involves looking at life in a different way. It emerges in the small, daily bits of experience that remind me I'm alive. I feel it when I open myself to wonder.

I can look out my sliding glass doors right now, turn my head, and see tall trees and shadowed mountains and the sky getting lighter just before sunrise. I can pick up the pocket color wheel I bought a couple of weeks ago at a craft store going-out-of-business sale, see the magic of the colors blending and playing off of each other. I can see the wood grain of my desk, or the cool white of a large blank piece of paper. Or I can look at photographs of my sons over the years, see the changing shapes of their faces and yet observe how they remain in some sense the same. Or I can, as I will in a few minutes, turn off the lamp and the computer and go back to bed and lie with my wife and hold her for a few minutes before we get up and the busy-ness of our day begins.

That's joy. And as long as I'm alive, I can experience those wonders. But only, I believe, so far as I'm also willing to experience everything else, to honestly open myself to the whole range of emotions. To wonder at experience means wondering at the loss as well as the gain, it means swallowing the universe whole, not picking my way through.

Happiness is large, and we seek those big moments when it makes its appearance. Joy is small but sprinkled everywhere. I need to remember, as much as anyone, to look; I need to remember to name it when I see it.