“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke
No feeling is final, the good and the bad, the pleasing or upsetting.
Even grief dissipates over time, and loss loosens its grip.
Yet, the Pandemic-driven anxiety with which the world continues to deal, the uncertainty of it all, the increasing division and angry rhetoric, contribute to propel us toward unpleasant feelings.
I have a suggestion to help counter-act that anxiety: Look for the good.
Actively seek out opportunities to feel grateful. Be determined about it, disciplined.
It makes no logical sense even as it makes emotional sense. Paradoxes are like that.
Notice the small moments because they are there for the taking.
Every glimpse of beauty is worth hanging onto.
Every peaceful interaction and hopeful exchange, if noticed—a child’s laughter, a bird’s song, a friend’s embrace—builds a sort of emotional immunity, a kind of armour against anxiety’s onslaught.
So, grab those smaller moments, look for them, seek them out and hold them tight; suck joy from them like a parched person sucks down water.
Not the exuberant joy of an external event, the melody—a promotion, an engagement or pregnancy, the longed-for hopes—but the base line in the song of life, the constant that keeps the beat, that makes the melody come alive.
It occurs to me that if we treated joy like we do our money, saving it, investing it, watching it grow, I bet we’d have more of it in our lives.
Joy, that is.
Just saying…
“Joy is the serious business of heaven.” ~C. S. Lewis
