Love and Joy

    I spend a lot of time on my capacity for despair. I spend so much time lamenting about all of the negative aspects of life because, in them, I find beauty and hope. It's not entirely clear to me why I lean in this direction as opposed to a more positive, optimistic outlook. I do know that when I think of love and beauty, my mind finds despair and betrayal. In a sense, it is almost more painful for me to think positively. I want to take a moment, though, to consider what I love and what makes me happy. 

    When another person entrusts me with their personal thoughts, I nearly feel worthy of hearing them. There isn't much that makes me feel pride or joy but I feel a sense of fulfillment when it feels like all of the work I've put into being open-minded and strong-willed in the direction of intellectual and emotional honesty have had a payoff. That is why I do it. I made the decision, or the decision made me, to explore what's inside me as openly and honestly as I can. If I do this, maybe I will gain the ability to build strong emotional connections with other people. Maybe I can take control of my life by understanding the thoughts that other people hide. Maybe I can influence other people to take control of their lives in this same way. 

    Genuine smiles and laughs are few and far between. It's hard for me to agree with the sentiment that there is anything that can not be joked about. Not for the sake of freedom of speech but for personal freedom. I would like it to be true that anything can be discussed, good or bad. I want to be a beacon of bad thoughts, taking on those of others and making them feel less alone. To decrease the negative power of these thoughts and to distort them into something more positive, it is essential to be able to laugh along with them. Not to laugh at them, which is to be superior to them. To carry them with you and to realize the burden isn't quite as detrimental as you may think, and to use them as the jet fuel that shoots you into a giggling frenzy. 

    The calmness and chaos of nature are laughable as well. To sit by a lake watching the sunset, surrounded by trees, and hearing nothing but birds chirping is a show of the calm and peace we all have inside of us. A setting like this brings it out of us and we can exist with it. Then to think of the chaos of nature, human or otherwise, can bring about a fit of laughter marked by a feeling of conflicting inferiority and superiority to nature. To feel the calmness, the peace with which our soul is capable of, is a reminder that we are simply existing as an individual, but we are also necessarily existing with everything else. An odd balance of attachment and detachment that makes us feel at peace. 

    Ultimately, if these concepts are to have any true meaning to me they must also have distinct opposites. There were times I was writing this when I began to question what I meant and I wanted to delve into a more negative mindset to explain myself, or even to bring up the possibility of discrediting myself altogether. For some reason, my mind seeks to discredit the solely joyous. I want to believe that life's mystique is explained by its intrinsic negatives when there are just as many positives. The positives feel more superficial and I wonder if that's because I have decided to explore the negative aspects of life. Maybe my love is what I need to better develop in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the good and bad.