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close up image of rocks and shells jumbled together on the beach

After a string of happy, peaceful days, days where I met new people, was invited to join them for outings, I was beginning to imagine that my life could be more like this in the months and years to come. It took almost no time at all to slip back into a familiar old place. That place where I cringe ever so slightly as a matter of course. Where I devote some portion of my thoughts to preparing for losing my footing again. Where I feel in my bones that I will somehow pay for this.

The other day I wrote in my journal a reminder that I don’t have to earn joy or peace. (News flash: either do you. None of us does.) Cognitively, I know that life isn’t a balance sheet. That we don’t have to come to some reckoning or accounting of the number of hours we suffered lined up against the number of joys we felt. I don’t have to justify feeling good. There is no amount of suffering I am required to endure in order to be qualified to experience happiness. I don’t have to pay dues for ease or satisfaction. These things don’t come at a cost. They just are. I am allowed to just experience them without apologizing or explaining or waiting for the other shoe to drop.

These things that rise up from my body in one way or another, the thoughts that prompt me to be wary of the times when I am happy, they are deep and powerful, hooked in to me in ways that require careful, deliberate handling. The admonitions that I am not allowed to laugh out loud, smile at the sight of a hummingbird in my backyard, wake with a sense of hope and gratitude unless I also acknowledge all of the suffering others are enduring and prepare for my own to come roaring back – those are ancient. They are messages from my parents, their parents, our culture. The idea that everything has a cost is a difficult one to ignore.

When I knew I was going to start a new life in a new place, I spent a great deal of time exploring notions of what I truly wanted. The kind of work I want to do, the people I want to surround myself with, the way I want to spend my time. I also thought about how I want to feel and move through the world. I wrote those things down and I practiced believing that I deserve them. I’ll say that again. I wrote those things down and I practiced believing that I deserve them. Because deserving is a loaded sentiment, but it doesn’t have to be. I can just deserve love and joy and care simply because I exist. I don’t have to work for it.

While I have become more comfortable with this idea, I still have to remind myself often that creating the life I want and giving myself permission to inhabit it are two different things. The other day I found myself with nothing on the calendar. At 2:00 in the afternoon, I had a moment of mild panic (yes, that’s a thing – at least for me) that I had nothing pressing to do. For a millisecond, I entertained the idea of grabbing the novel I was reading and lying down on my bed to read. I indulged the fantasy quickly – the dogs stretched out next to me beneath the ceiling fan that was slowly pulling the ocean air through the windows, the curtains billowing slightly, me propped up on pillows, deep in a good book. And then came a visceral recoiling and the voices in my head:

You can’t do that. Surely you could mop the kitchen floor instead. Or go find some weeds to pull. Or at the very least, go outside. It’s sunny and beautiful. Get some fresh air. Or get on the elliptical machine and exercise. Certainly you could find something productive to do instead of lying down with a book at 2pm!

My gut tightened. How irresponsible could I be to think it would be ok just to lie down with a book in the middle of the afternoon?

But here’s how I know I’m making progress; from some deep corner of my heart came another voice that said simply,

this is the life you wanted to create for yourself – a life of ease and rest. Why wouldn’t you lie down and read for a while? 

And so I did. And I’m fairly certain I fell asleep for a bit, too. And when I woke up, the dogs were nestled against my legs and the kitchen floor was still unmopped and I hadn’t burned any calories, but I was a little bit closer to believing that I deserve joy and peace in my life, however it shows up. The work of animating the knowledge I have deep within me takes presence and intention, and the more I practice the better it gets. Here’s to believing that we all deserve joy and happiness and ease, no matter what.

“In a culture of deep scarcity – of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough – joy can feel like a setup.”  Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

I lived those words for most of my life.  Every time I found myself knee-deep in joy I fantasized about when someone would come pull the plug and it would all drain away.  When the girls were two and four, Bubba was traveling more often than not, struggling with an undiagnosed illness that left him hospitalized every few months, and I was scared.  I was wracked with stomach cramps and sinking deeper and deeper into depression with every passing day and I somehow felt right at home.  While I couldn’t accurately predict what any one day would bring, dealing with crisis after crisis kept me busy and feeling competent. I could put out fires all day long and, while I was exhausted at night, dealing with one fire meant that I didn’t have to worry when or where the next one would flare up.  If a day passed without anything falling apart, my nerves were stretched taut as I waited, hypervigilant, scanning the landscape for the slightest new flame.  I expected danger. I anticipated fear. I did what most of Brene’s research subjects talked about; I lived in fear so that when something awful happened, I was already in the trench and wouldn’t have to feel the pain of falling or climbing back down. It was easier to stay in the dark than to suffer the loss of light.

Or so I thought.

These days I expect joy.  Despite a very challenging summer and early fall, struggling with a major construction project that is two months behind schedule, one pet’s death and a cancer diagnosis for another, and a very close call with one of our daughters, I have somehow managed to stay positive.  Instead of waking up each morning in trepidation, worried about what this day may bring, I open my eyes and seek the light.

In Daring Greatly, Brown writes about gratitude being the antidote to fear of joy. She says that people who practice counting their blessings aren’t afraid to feel joy like so many others.  I believe that wholeheartedly and credit my own daily gratitude practice with helping change my perspective on life, but I think there is another step beyond gratitude that is even more powerful. If the spectrum starts on the left at fear of joy (or, as Brown says it, “foreboding joy” – that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop the second you realize you are happy beyond measure), gratitude is nearing the other end, but I say that the far right end of the spectrum is expecting joy.

I wake up every day expecting joy. Knowing that no matter what challenge or sadness I may face today, there will also be joy. Something will happen today that will bring me pure happiness.  This is probably the single biggest thing ever to happen to me.

“Do we deserve our joy, given our inadequacies and imperfections? What about the starving children and the war-ravaged world? Who are we to be joyful?” Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Indeed. Who am I? Why do I deserve to be joyful? I used to ask myself this question, and then, at one point, a friend pointed out to me that I certainly deserved it, given the struggles I have had in my life – from a difficult childhood to my husband’s prolonged illness and beyond.  I calculated up the traumas I have faced and had to agree with her that I probably did ‘deserve’ joy on some level.  But this entire notion of deserving joy is something I am patently uncomfortable with.  For one thing, as a mother, I don’t want my children to have to EARN their joy by enduring hardship, or worry that if they do live joyful lives, they will one day have to pay for it with trauma and unhappiness.

The fact is, there isn’t some High Priestess of Joy doling out happiness according to a balance sheet she’s been given about who deserves what.  Joy is out there in the world. We simply have to train ourselves to recognize it, acknowledge it, expect it.  Joy coexists with sadness, it doesn’t cancel it out. When I look at my sweet puppy boy lying on his bed, feet twitching as he dreams, I feel a tenderness and an outpouring of love for him and the relationship we have and that love sits side-by-side with the knowledge that he has malignant melanoma and will die sooner than I want him to. The joy and gratitude I feel at having been so lucky to have him in my life are deepened and enhanced by the knowledge that one day soon he will not be here anymore.

We humans like things to even out. We love balance, but we also like to be ready for disaster.  The irony is, as we use our energy to prepare for calamity, we rarely prepare for joy.  We walk around searching for potholes to avoid, ready to duck if something comes flying, but very few of us spend any time practicing opening ourselves to receive or recognize opportunities for joy.  We are creating our own imbalance.  I have decided to turn that on its head and, instead, wake up every morning expecting joy, believing that, if nothing else, today I will discover at least one thing that will stop me in my tracks with wonder and awe.

Whoops! It’s summertime and I have summer brain which, for me, means a lot less writing and a lot more hanging out with Eve and Lola. I like to say that I work on writing about 2/3 time during the school year and 1/4 of the time in the summer. This summer in Seattle has been particularly lovely weather-wise, and the girls and I have had a ball taking advantage of the city’s attractive parks and water everywhere.

I realized, though, that my last post was fairly gloomy and I thought I’d better update my status lest you think I’m moping over here.  Au contraire – Eve went off to a week long sleepaway camp last weekend and Bubba left for a conference on the East Coast on Monday (yup, sucks to be him), so it’s just been Lola and me this week and it has rocked. Monday we decided to blow out of town, hopped a ferry with the dog and took off to wherever we wanted.  At one point, after the biggest damn ice cream I’d ever seen, we veered off the road and found a mostly deserted beach full of driftwood and a clean public restroom.  We walked the shoreline finding dead jellyfish that Lola picked up with sticks and flung back out into the sea, discovering enormous clam shells full of barnacles and throwing sticks for the dog to fetch in the surf. When we finally settled down on some driftwood and Lola started creating art out of sticks and stones and sand, she looked up,

“Mom? When do we have to leave the beach?”

“Whenever we want. We have no agenda, love. Eat when we’re hungry. Drive when we want to find a new place to hang out, sleep when we’re tired. That’s all. Just us and whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it.”

Oh, the look on her face.
Simply glorious.

We stayed for three hours, soaking up the sunshine, playing with the dog and only leaving when our stomachs started to rumble.  About ten miles down the road we found a hotel with a pool that accepted dogs, checked in and had a lovely dinner looking out at a marina full of great blue herons and beautiful sailboats.  Lola swam to her heart’s content at 9:30 that night and we woke up the next morning happy and rested.  We rented a kayak, paddled through glass-smooth waters with seals poking their heads up to greet us every few feet, spied bright orange and purple sea stars just beneath us and watched herons dive for their breakfast.  When we got hot and tired, we headed back to hang out with the dog some more.

I could bore you with the rest of the details, but let’s just say that even though we’re home now, we are still taking advantage of our ‘us’ time by doing whatever we want whenever we want to.

It rocks.