Oct. 20, 2023: Surprised by Joy

When C.S  Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy in 1956, he meant the title to be a double entendre. The first meaning was about the ecstasy he felt in religious experience, a sort of ode to how Christianity saved his life. The second had to do with his wife, Joy, whom he, a confirmed bachelor, married in his 50s. Joy died of cancer only 4 years later. Lewis was devastated, but held onto his love and joy in her memory.

For me that feeling of experiencing such joy is something that’s very dear to my heart.  I hope that everyone experiences those moments of great happiness, the kind of powerful emotion that rises up from the belly and explodes in your head with a rush of dopamine. Science tells us that it’s simply a neurological experience.  And it is.  But it’s so much more than that.  One of the sorrows of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other neurological diseases is the loss of the ability to feel happiness.

However, one of the wonders of being surprised by joy is the way it can creep up on you in the funniest ways. It can be a religious ecstasy, it can be from psychedelics. It can happen out in nature, it can be from a scene in a movie, a favorite food or smell.

I  think that it’s possible that as we get older, being in a state of joy might occur less and less. Perhaps.  Our brains change, for sure, but science also tells us that our brain may not be degenerative after all, but constantly creating new paths of experience, if we only let it.  Maybe because as we age, we have more and more repetitive things happen to us, and there’s less and less that’s “new”.  So it’s possible, for example, that a lot of older folks do more traveling not just because they’re retired and can, but also to discover new experiences and stimulate that old feeling of pleasure.

As for myself, my life certainly has had more than my share of incredible moments of being surprised by joy. Singing Handel’s Messiah in a small church in New Hampshire at age 18 comes to mind. One of the most ecstatic experiences I’ve ever had, and I am most assuredly not religious! It was the harmony of voices and the acoustics. I spent half of the performance crying more than singing. Peyote and  mushrooms, of course, have also offered wonderful moments of sensory wows. How about olfactory delight?  One time in New Orleans, Alan and I were at Arnaud’s where we were served warm, fresh beignets.  The server put the plate right in front of me and the smell of it was overwhelming; it brought tears to my eyes.  Just thinking of it brings that smell back…..🥰.

Okay, strange. But, for me, the overwhelming majority of moments of heart-stopping  exhilaration have come from nature. And still come from nature. Starting as a young child, it has never let up. I can be standing on a mountaintop, or sitting down by a creek, hiding in a lava tube, drowning in aspens, avoiding a morning spider web covered in dew, or looking at rocky crags above treeline.  Wham!  That emotion of rejoicing arrives.

But the one that’s happened most in nature for me has occurred when I am simply walking down a trail. A new trail perhaps, but even one I’ve been on many times.  A quiet uncrowded trail, just walking along and around a corner and boom!  There’s this astounding vista, and my belly and chest and head are filled with a sense of warmth and wonder and I have a huge, silly grin plastered on my face.  It’s physical. Maybe I’ve been in thick trees and make a turn and all of a sudden can see for miles or maybe it’s been in a dark forest of spruce and I traipse across some deadfall thinking of nothing and kazaam!  It’s a whole aspen family in full color.

The feeling has always been the motivation for hiking and backpacking. Always. It holds me in thrall and has me pushing to go just that little bit further. What’s around that next corner? Maybe I’ll be surprised by joy, right? 

That’s what started me painting many years ago. I wanted to capture those moments.

Inspired by Alan, I began painting this whole series of trails. I think I ended up doing 17, paintings of the forest with paths.  Inevitably the path I painted disappeared around a bend. And that painting was trying to see beyond that corner.

My goal was always to push the viewer into thinking about what might possibly be around that bend. What’s just out of sight? Will they be surprised by it? Will it bring a whoosh of happiness?  I don’t paint anymore. But I do take pictures with my camera and post them in blogs and wish my photos might capture that same feeling. Certainly Alan and I are out there a lot, searching for new places, new paths, new corners to peer around. He’s the one now, even more than me, who says “Let’s just go a little further. What’s around that corner?”  One time, he said “Just another 50 feet.”  And we went, and we found the trail junction we’d been looking for for hours in the Arizona heat.  Just that extra 50 feet did it.  Such wonderful delight: 2 MORE trails stretching off in either direction.  Maybe it’s a kind of addiction: the search for joy. While all the time it’s just neurons, it’s the way in which our brains are so great. 

That brain wiring is what allows us old dogs to learn new tricks. (As an aside, I personally believe that all creatures have the same capacity for joy. I know my dogs do!)  If Rick Hanson has it right in “Hardwiring Happiness”, every time you are surprised by joy you’re creating new neural pathways, like new sledding runs on a clean snowy hill, which like the paths in my paintings, open you up to infinite possibilities.

I talk about this capacity for joy now because this is that time of year when much of the country is enjoying the fall colors.  Right, this minute. I’m looking at a tree Alan calls Marilyn Monroe. She is a huge cottonwood, tucked back in a corner of our canyon surrounded by junipers and ponderosas. Every year  Marilyn turns the most unbelievable, golden color that just shimmers like nothing I’ve ever seen in a cottonwood tree.  We have a lot of cottonwoods in the canyon and they’re beautiful and turn golden orange. But this one, because she’s protected, will last for weeks and weeks, just shimmering phosphorescence and brilliance. And every year I see it and I’m shocked, I’m surprised by joy.  As I am right now.