The Joy That Makes You Weep

Shedding all the waits

You plunge, whirl, disturb the peace

Because you’re alive.

What I wish for, but know better than to pursue, is feeling joy that brings me to tears.

That joy bursts such brilliant large, unstoppable force that it shatters fragile shell of polite obligation.

All the long slogs, the painstaking attention to showing up and doing what needs to be done, are transformed. Without facing the toughest challenges and continuing onward when you can’t imagine taking another step, there would be no such joy.

Joy can be as subtle as a low buzzing hum as you’re making the effort. The push-ups that were once impossible now come easily enough that you can make sure that you’re in good form. The story holds together from start to finish; no characters have changed identities, no plot strands have gotten tangled. Somehow, the lattice top of your homemade apple pie looks deliberate rather than awkward accident.

Small joys, but joy nonetheless. No weeping, but definitely a huge grin, if only on the inside. There is still that momentary zing of “Can this be real?” and that changes everything from that moment on — because it is real and you get to live the reality where it is true.

Joy can come with tears. The weeping is not grief, not even ugly crying, but shedding all the dragging down horribles and soaring to the sky in great whooping arcs. These tears leave behind the despairs, doubts, and doldrums you’ve lived for so long that they began to feel like real life.

“Can I be this happy?” might be questions you hear as you exult.

There are joys that come only years after the event. As a child, I loved to play in the creek that ran along our property. There, I ran a superior bakery specializing in mud pies and clay cookies lavished with sawdust and pretty pebbles.

I still love running pebbles through my fingers. That joy is a quiet ping, a gentle memory of an ambitious, mud-splattered kid.

While there is nothing better than weeping for joy, I invite small daily pleasures that keep the way clear for joy:

I write for the sheer joy of it. It is joy to express a thought, imagine a scene or characters and manage to get something decent on the page.

I have writing goals — hard and fast expectations and commitments — but those aren’t why I write. I know that I will develop my craft when I show up regularly and do the work, and while that matters a great deal to me, that’s not why I show up to write.

I write for the joy of expressing ideas and experiences imagined or real. There are bad days, when nothing goes write and the computer goes folded-arms uncooperative. I write for the fortuitous typos, for the “write” instead of “right.” I don’t cry over them, but I do give them a wink and a smile.

There are good days. There are days when the writing is so fast, so pure, so gorgeous that I am stunned to realize only an hour has gone by. I feel like I’ve been to a different planet and am shocked to discover I’m sitting at my desk, coffee cup drained and dog needing to go outside. I don’t cry over those times, but I sure do grin and thrill inside as I head downstairs to brew more coffee.

The joy that made me weep today was so small that it startled me when I realized it was there.

My dog insisted on going for a walk. A year ago, that would have been an “of course” kind of thing, but in his dotage and kidney disease, there are more days than not when he has little interest in a foray to sniff the world around us.

Yup, I was that blubbering, talkative woman babbling at her dog when I took off his harness when we got home. I wiped tears as he snarfed down a treat and looked up for more, as he always has done.

It was a small, everyday joy banished with a quick swipe under my eyes before I headed upstairs to do the work that brings me the joy that makes me weep.

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