Joy vs happiness

Things that make me happy:

• nutella
• patients who make me bookmarks or necklaces or cookies or cakes
• getting cheap Grey's Anatomy DVDs from Trade Me
• Foy Vance's voice
• people trying (and failing) to do a Northern Irish accent (especially when their accent becomes Indian)
• banter with my rugby boys at 5:40 a.m. (there is not much else that makes 5:40 a.m. a happy time)
• Wild Bean coffee
• when people comment on my blog
• letters from home (especially when the envelopes also contain Percy Pigs)
• Dutch Blitz (a vonderfool goot game!)

I think, for a lot of my life, I've looked for happiness. Well ,who doesn't? I've (often relentlessly) pursued the things that make me happy. It's only natural. Natural for me to pursue conversations with certain people because I know they'll make me smile, natural for me to make sure the kettle is boiled at 10 a.m. so I can have my caffeine fix (natural, but also essential, for the sanity of everyone around me), natural for me to quote lines from 'He's just not that into you' to the appropriate people because I know it'll make both of us laugh. I know these aren't bad things, but what I've learned is that they aren't the only things and for that, I'm thankful...

I'm thankful because, although there are things that make me happy, happiness is not the goal. I love the things that make me smile, but I don't want to live my life from high to high, happy moment to happy moment, from thrill to thrill, because these things don't last. They are temporary, short-lived, quick to fade.

More than happiness, I want joy, which I've come to see is not an emotion, but a state of being. Joy does not depend on circumstances like happiness does. CS Lewis (who, I'm pretty sure, would have been my BFF if I'd been alive 80 years ago) said, "joy is never in our power and pleasure (happiness) often is". Happiness is putting on a cosy hoodie and snuggling into a beanbag while a storm is raging outside. Joy is standing out in the middle of the storm, enduring the torrents and embracing the wind and being at peace. It doesn't come from what's going on around you, things you can control. It is a deep satisfaction that comes from inside and it is good. It lasts and it fulfils, so much more than the momentary things that make us happy.