How to Be Joyful (even if you don't feel it)

The art of delighting in being

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

I’ve written a lot in this space about struggling with depression and anxiety, but it seems to me that there is an opposite and corresponding challenge many people have: learning how to live with joy. I mean how to live with joy well. I suspect most of us just think of joy as this positive state we’ll one day reach where we don’t have to think, where we can just ride on the bliss of existence without a care in the world, as something that will come to us automatically. But the absence of contemplation shouldn’t be the ideal of the Good Life. Real joy involves choices about what to think about and how to think about things. Real joy involves contemplation and reorientation of our hearts. Real joy involves a surrendering of power and an acceptance of God’s sovereignty and love. In other words, properly understood, joy is not usually something we can stumble into. Like learning how to live with depression and anxiety, we must learn how to live with joy. This is part of the broader process of relearning how to be human, paying careful attention to the basic parts of human life which we might otherwise glide by in ignorance. Specifically, we must learn to be joyful through habits and practices and the work of the Holy Spirit, or we will squander our experiences on ephemera and emptiness.