I talk a lot about the idea of joy and how important I think it is for our existence; but I think the common usage of the word "joy" in contemporary English doesn't really fully define the idea, at least not as I understand it.

To me, joy is not simply a fleeting, emotional giddyness or burst of intense happiness or pleasure. Rather, I think of joy as being a sort of deliberate, intentional way of understanding our lives.

Joy is about finding the value, beauty, and wonder in our existence - in any and every way we can. Joy is about delighting in the mystery, the miracle, the profound questions of life itself. Joy is about cherishing the brief and finite opportunity we have to experience this configuration of reality.

I think it's also important to be clear about what joy is not. It is not willful ignorance. It is not turning away from or denying pain. It is not choosing to ignore "bad" things or things that are not happy. It is not about toxic positivity or "silver linings" or constantly trying to distort everything into "good" things. It is not the insistence that "everything happens for a reason" with the implication that the reason is something we should embrace.

On the contrary, having access to joy is what allows us to truly handle feeling all the pain, struggle, frustration, difficulty, and fear that come with being alive. Joy is what gives us the capacity to understand that unpleasant or troublesome emotions almost always come with a kind of symmetry. We feel grief in response to losing something valuable. We feel anger in response to unfairness and injustice and mistreatment and violation - anger is fundamentally tied to a desire to protect. We feel horror in response to terrible things like wars and genocides and environmental disaster at the hands of oppression and greed.

And at the core of all of these feelings, as hard as they can be to bear, there is an acknowledgement of something that should be a source of joy: the value of life, the preciousness of our world itself, the importance of existing in mutual, loving, supportive relationship with our very universe and everything around us.

Joy does not invite us to reject these feelings, or try and "rush through" them. Rather, joy is what allows us to recognize that such emotions and responses are caused by the removal of joy from the world. Knowing that we can and will return to a healthy state of joy is what helps us truly embrace and process feeling things we'd rather not.

In other words, the more we are in touch with sources of joy in our lives, the more readily we can endure pain and difficulty, without falling into the trap of believing that the pain and difficulty are all there is. After all, there is no liberation in always being miserable.

When we choose to return to joy, not as an escape from difficulty but as the goal of confronting difficulty, we establish the foundations of living truly liberated lives. Refusing to let go of our joy is an assertion of our own worth, our own value, and our own power. Celebrating and nurturing the joys of ourselves and others is crucial fuel for the journey to everyone's freedom.