On Joy
It’s a bright March day and I’m casting back thoughts to the leaf-strewn Autumn of 2021 - remembering the weekend my son saw his Dad (a seafarer) for the first time in 4 months.
As it was a Friday and my first free evening in a while, I decided I should ‘do’ a Proper Friday Night. Except that I couldn’t quite remember how you ‘do’ a proper Friday night. Proper Friday nights - and whatever it is I’d decided were their characteristic and constituent parts - are few and far between in my world.
Reverting to type, I packed a bag with my swimming kit, jumped in the car and drove to the nearest coastal town. Arriving with no plan whatsoever, I lingered in the car awhile - completely rudderless.
I followed my feet to the familiar and wandered off to the organic deli. I bought a large fresh baguette and a packet of crisps. Neither of which I needed - some sort of survival mode kicking in?!
Back in the car, I drove further north to the next town - slightly bigger, more scope, more ‘Friday Night’ I decided. Realising that I’d left my water bottle at home, I parked up in the supermarket multi-storey car park.
My son Gwynfi and I like driving right up to the top level, to the outdoor bit, because something about the rooftop vibe and the angular concrete aesthetic, lends the pretence of being band members in LA shooting our hit music video.
Sometimes too, we go up and down the travelators - imagining that we’re glamorous jet-setters. In reality, the travelators lead to either the M&S pants section, or Tescos. Still, in Gwynfi’s honour, I did a bit of travelator jet-setting too.
I was beginning to relax into my new-found Friday night freedom at this point, but I still didn’t have a Proper Friday Night Plan. So I went into the supermarket, found some bottled water. (Because hey, that’s rock ’n roll, right?!)
I also found a giant, garish sunflower costume in the kids section, tried it on, got completely stuck, had a protracted panic about how I’d explain this one, got an attack of the giggles… finally extricated myself from the sunflower… paid for my water and then went back up to the car, parked at the top in the ‘LA’ evening sunshine.
I was beginning to recline into my Friday night out, but I still didn’t have a plan. Just a series of whims. But a series of whims was starting to feel better than a plan by now. (Possibly even a genius life-hack too!)
So I followed the next whim: drove to the prom, parked up, popped my iPod in my ears - for company really - and strolled the length of the seafront. At the end of the prom, there’s a steep hill that juts up and out over the town. I’d walk up that: the next whim.
By this point, I was really getting into the music piping into my ears and I slowed my walking pace right down to a dawdle and started dancing. It wasn’t really a conscious decision so much as my body couldn’t help but move to the rhythm…
About halfway up the hill, still dancing, still slow-sashaying from side to side across the path - completely lost in my own world of good tunes and slinky moves, I suddenly had this immense feeling of release. As though all of a sudden and quite dramatically, all the tensions of the last few weeks and months were shaking loose and melting away. And in their place almost instantly, this great surge of joy poured into me and opened out into a euphoric high - as though I were suddenly invincible and everything in the world was open and possible.
In the flick of a switch, it felt like I’d suddenly been plugged back in to my own vitality and life-force and all my lights had been switched on… if this sounds a little dramatic-fantastical, it felt like that in that moment too.
But dancing has always had this effect on me and yet somehow, it had been so long since I’d danced.
How does this happen? How had I stopped dancing? How had I forgotten the magic of its effects?
How is it that we fall out of step with the very things that make us feel most alive? Even the simplest, most accessible of things?
At the top of the hill, I put my random gubbins down and carried on dance-jiggling about. Picnic tables at the top offered a stage and I jumped across them, using them like giant stepping stones. By now, almost falling off tables, ‘drunk’ on my own self-made joy, I kept collapsing into fits of giggles…
Suddenly aware that the light was fading fast, I reluctantly zig-zagged jaunty hips back to the path and made my way back down the hill. Nearing the bottom and deeply immersed back in the musical groove, I did a fast side-step, moonwalked back on myself and then sashay-waltzed around a corner… and landed… right into the path of a youngish lad, lingering on a bridge - also lost in his own world.
As he caught sight of me, he smiled and I started laughing again - the suddenly coy, pink-cheeked giggle of someone who has just been discovered ‘naked’ in their own private moment.
The coyness was mutual however and a sweet little exchange opened out between us. The curiously open and easy chat of two people whose guards have been set aside awhile. Still, it was a chat lasting only minutes before wishing each other well and continuing on our respective paths. Me lost in a world of music, he gazing up at the stars.
Pushing our hands down deep into pockets of self-made joy.
*
Actively carving out moments of joy in my days - with and without my son Gwynfi - has become something of a lifeline for me. Apparently spontaneous and whimsical but also deliberate and intentional.
A strategy and skill I have crafted with due diligence over this last decade. A decade in which I have been backed into a corner so many times that I’ve been forced to realise that my best way out has been to duck under the legs of ‘adulting’ and skip back to the essence of me as I was in childhood.
Sometimes I even think that joy-making is one of the greatest acts of resistance and rebellion that we have in our personal and collective ‘tool’ kits… not so much as an act of superficial inanity or a denial of the personal challenges and global/political dystopias that we are all swirling about in, but as an explicitly strengthening activity to better enable us to face the darker, more challenging aspects of our lives.
Joy - finding it, following it - is often touted as being a luxury. A privilege of the ‘time rich’, surplus wealth, classes.
But I’m a cash-strapped, single parent living on a housing estate. And joy - even the teeniest tiniest doses of it - costs me nothing.
But it rewards me everything.
