We See Joy in the Most Unexpected Places
August 20, 2024
“A part of you knows
That what it means to connect
Is to live where too hard
And too soft intersect…
Because why have a heart if you won’t let it break?
It’s not a mistake
It’s the risk that you take
It’s the choice that you make
It’s your chance to awaken.”
By Rowan Mangan
This poem touched me this morning. This place where, “too hard and too soft intersect,” where life is happening, that some of us have come to feel so comfortable with and some of us shy away from. Rowan Mangan does a beautiful job expressing what it means to delve deeply into the essence of being alive, that truly living requires embracing all aspects of life, the hard, the soft; our vulnerability. By allowing ourselves to be open, we get to experience the full strength and power of life. In the work we do here, I feel like we see this all day, everyday. The moment where someone realizes that protecting themselves from feeling all of life keeps them cycling and missing out on life's riches. When we see it, there’s freedom. And we never get to the end of freedom.
We may try to shield ourselves from heartbreak and pain and avoid the risks that come with deeply feeling, but what do we sacrifice in doing so? We miss out on the profound depths of love and joy that vulnerability can bring. Allowing ourselves to FEEL all aspects of life wakes us up to so much possibility and joy that is hard to find then we try and avoid it.
I mean, can we ever truly protect ourselves? Even when we try to avoid vulnerability, we still encounter pain, loss, and heartbreak. That’s just part of life. But in trying to avoid feeling all of that, we often deny ourselves feeling all the good stuff too. The joy that comes from truly being ourselves and finally letting go of the bullshit and the masks and just being you. You might be surprised by how much more fun it is and how much more alive you feel. I know I do and I see it everyday. People being willing to show up to the pain and the tragedy also have so much more access to joy and peace. And what’s not to love about joy and peace. It’s our birthright, it comes through us when we stop trying so hard.
We’ve all seen joy show up in the most unlikely of places. Here at the Insight Alliance, we see it in prisons all the time. Places where you’d think joy goes to die, we find it lurking in the corners waiting to spring out and surprise us. We see it in the office in the middle of a nightmare, putting out a fire or when we’re trying to figure out how to find loopholes and opportunities for people just released. We see it out on the streets. There it is, right under our noses. Joy appears. We don’t need to find shelter from all the storms inside ourselves or outside ourselves, they’re inevitable. Embracing all the complexities of emotional experiences, allowing life's challenges to open us up to its beauty. One cannot exist without the other; when we hide from vulnerability, we miss out on both.