Joy=Suffering
"I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives."
-Tim Kreider
There was a younger version of me that seemed to think that the most honest emotions that I had were those of grief and fear. The cry of my soul, those nights where I felt overwhelmed, lost, and scared somehow felt more sophisticated than the silly and almost trivial emotion of happiness. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I found solace in the world of art that seemed to be the only place that even indicated that others ever felt the same way. I relished the way that art glorified depression, anger, and sadness. I empathized with the spitting rage of rap music, and girded myself with its armor, sulked to the somber ballads of indie music, relished the legends of the pain of the artist: Van Gogh, Beethoven, David Foster Wallace, Dostoyevsky, Robin Williams and was titillated by the Joker- the agent of anarchy, the shepherd of the Dark Night. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
To some extent this glorification is understandable. Dark emotions are so under-represented in ordinary conversation that the artistic cry of pain seems to be the only place where we can even find evidence that it exists in anyone but ourselves. It is ok to feel pain. It is human to suffer. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
But suffering is only a fraction of the human condition. There are also moments of euphoria, of grandeur, of celebration and of awe. In the same way that death exists, so does life. Sickness and healing. Horror and glory. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
There is nothing more true about our capacity to suffer than the capacity to rejoice. We should celebrate our moments of celebration with the same ferocity that we mourn our losses. Judaism does an excellent job of striking this balance of building both moments of celebration, like the holiday we just concluded, alongside periods of mourning, like the fasts over the destruction and our historic persecution. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
But rather than dismissing euphoria, as the Buddhists might, as a shallow emotional state, we are taught to sanctify it and to direct it toward celebrating the beautiful world we have been gifted, our place in it, our ability to connect with one and other, and our relationship with the the great and powerful force of its inception.
