Chasing the joy that's here

So many days, I forget.

Maybe in the next bonus. Perhaps on that hike I want to take. Could it be on that next call? A workout? Would it hide at that event on Friday night?

While I get busy looking for joy, the subtle weights of life pile up. The worry. The stress. The obligations…

I’m tired. Sad. Far from myself.

My motorcycle was stolen recently. I need to walk someplace to get a form printed & notarized, then send it back. Sounds like a drag, right?

Wrong.

I can enjoy the walk.

I can enjoy writing this note.

I can perhaps even enjoy what once upon a time felt like suffering.

The joy is not an external gift. It’s an internal choice to feel the beauty already here.

To feel this moment — the joy of living and experiencing life.

Matthieu Ricard, the French Buddhist monk whose brain neuroscientist Richard Davidson called the happiest ever studied, describes happiness not as something you find — but as a skill, trainable like any other.¹

I know people feel pain. I don’t wish it on you.

I wish you joy — not from outside of you.

I wish for you to connect to a source of joy within you, as it is within me — always here.

Always now.

Footnote ¹:

In 2004, neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin wired 256 sensors onto the skull of Matthieu Ricard — a French Buddhist monk who had also completed a PhD in molecular genetics before leaving science to meditate. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared eight long-term practitioners (each with between 10,000 and 50,000 hours of practice) against controls with no meditation experience. Ricard’s gamma wave activity — the neural signature of consciousness, attention, and compassion — was the highest ever recorded in the scientific literature. (Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice, PNAS, 2004.)