The Time for Joy

A short trip to Santa Fe, a tearful plane ride, and making space for both joy and suffering.

Welcome to Making Time. Each week, I share thoughts and ideas for making more time for yourself by building creative energy and establishing rituals and practices. This year, I’m also attempting The 2024 Slowdown, which you can do with me. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

I’ve just returned from a trip to Santa Fe, NM. It was a much-needed respite after an unusually packed and stressful month. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been hustling more than I’d like, and unfortunately falling into a few old patterns that left me feeling a bit frayed around the edges.

What I needed was a hard reset, and travel seems to do it for me. It’s a reliable palate cleanser for my mind. When I feel myself spiraling, doing and thinking things that I know are not good for me but feeling unable to stop, it’s time to clear things out and remind myself of the vast splendor of this world.

New Mexico is a magical place, a pastel landscape of ever-shifting light and color. I particularly like Santa Fe, drawn as I am to American cities with their own distinct culture. This is my third time there as an adult, and it’s as wonderful as ever.

As we flew to New Mexico, I opened up the book I’d grabbed from the library, Voices from Chernobyl. I know, not exactly a light vacation read. I can’t tell you why I chose this book, except that I’ve wanted to read it for a while and felt a bit ignorant about the historical facts surrounding the Chernobyl disaster.

As I read the very first account, a story of a young woman newly married to one of the first responders who watched him succumb to acute radiation sickness, I began to cry uncontrollably. I felt compassion for her suffering, but also all the suffering we humans have to endure when we love one another. It’s inescapable.

It was a harrowing story of loss; the unfairness of it, the unexpected grief, all the horror of losing someone you love struck me hard right there on the plane, on the way to my desert mini-vacation.

I’ve been seeing some (justified, understandable) hand-wringing lately about focusing on things that are sweet, gentle, or joyful when there is so much suffering in the world. It feels like a betrayal, like denial. And maybe it is.

I came across this quote from musican Joan Baez in Laura Olin’s newsletter (pulled from this rather enormous and terrific series in the NYT Style Magazine, which is well worth a read):

“I never dreamed I’d live in a world this chaotic and discouraging, and I’m overwhelemed but I’m also a great believer in denial – I think that’s where you have to be in order to create, or have fun or dance – providing that we set aside a certain amount of time to come out of denial and actually do something to help.”

It made me think about the process of grieving, and that when catastrophe happens in our lives, we must be willing to give ourselves the time to feel grief in order to find some measure of acceptance of our new reality. Grief takes time from our lives, and it can’t be rushed.

And maybe it’s the same with joy. Maybe we need to give ourselves the time to feel it, to cultivate it, to experience it deeply in order to shore up our souls for all the bad stuff, and to lend strength to others.

Perhaps instead of feeling guilt for experiencing joy in the face of all the world’s tragedy, we should see it as a small, quiet way of strengthening ourselves so that we can be more fully human for ourselves and others.

Anyway, I remain a great believer in joy – not in spite of how terrifying the world is, but because of it.

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