Dancer: Rachel VanDyne
I’m feeling a lot right now, but it’s all rather paradoxical. As I teach in the Peony Method, we can and must hold these paradoxes.
There’s no either/or in our existence or in our emotional lives. When we want to either/or ourselves like that, I guarantee it’s a sort of emotional bypassing — a desire to feel just “good” and push away more difficult things.
Because it’s always both. Always. We can feel good but we also feel like the world is falling apart. We can feel sad but the kitten is making us laugh.
Right now, I’m feeling both joy and curiosity about a bunch of things, including, of course, tennis and slow jogging. Both of which are definitely at the obsession and special interest level which makes not only my body happy but also my brain.
Right now, I’m also feeling despair and exhaustion. For more reasons than I care to articulate but for one tiny example…
I just watched a (“whyte spiritual”) woman on TikTok try to say that Kanye West’s blatant and violent antisemitism is really his Christ enlightenment shining through and he’s trying to elevate all of us. (WHAT the actual FUCK?)
That makes me, first, want to vomit (for real… it made me sick) and second, to start lecturing everyone about the pre-Holocaust days in Germany but it also makes me want to just shut down.
Despair and exhaustion are dangerously enticing for us, aren’t they?
As a GenXer in particular, it’s easy for me to roll my eyes and say whatever to almost anything. I think that’s true for a lot of us.
We learned to survive via a certain kind of apathy. (Which wasn’t really real. We care almost TOO deeply and have felt so powerless that we decided to pretend not to care.)
As I write this, I am thinking through this. I don’t have answers. I don’t have any sense of a pathway out of this.
I have only some… inklings.
First, I trust Mr. Merton there in that quote. His conclusions didn’t come from some idealistic monastic life. He lived through very difficult times historically. He was someone who was constantly questioning all ideas and even more so himself. He dug deep and he traveled wide, always open to wisdom coming from anywhere. He was a student of many Eastern philosophies, and though he remained Catholic, all of that informed his utterly mystical views of life.
All that’s to say, I think he was onto something with this hope thing.
But second, notice his language.
This is not some esoteric or ethereal hope.
This is active hope. Aggressive hope.
And it’s not just abstract hope. It’s concrete hope as acted through our very concrete human bodies.
Which brings me to this thing that’s been floating around on my front page and in my hashtags for quite some time and in my brain for even longer — what I call the Re/Joy Project.
I have notes upon notes upon notes about this concept but the other day I said something somewhere that gave me the piece that I think we need right now.
What would happen if you were simply, day to day, moving through life with a curiosity about joy?
I think that phrase — curiosity about joy — takes away pressure and replaces it with some sense of breathing space and freedom.
But I think it matches Merton’s “trampling down with hope.”
They’re both active.
Curiosity about joy says that joy is not some magical thinking way of living waiting for you to just stumble upon it or suddenly feel it or that joy is perhaps just for the “lucky.”
It says you need to go out and purposefully investigate. Search for clues. Pay attention. Always have your notebook and tools at the ready.
I’ll be writing about more ways to do this but for now I’m planting the seed.
Acknowledge and make space for all the sad and the despair and the fear and the anxiety and the anger but don’t forget this other stuff too.