I remember so clearly the first time I laughed until I cried as I was surfacing from the worst periods of my life. It was strange and I felt guilty. I shouldn’t be allowed to be laughing, all things considered. I should be focused and in penance, prostrate for forgiveness and full of green juices and gym memberships. (Neither of which I’ve ever been full of by the way).
I don’t mean by this that all things must be joyful or that I’m requesting a clownish plastering of smiles across all interactions throughout a day. I’m not sure where I stand on the relentless positivity approach in general. Mindset is obviously an incredibly powerful thing. John Milton wrote many moons ago (also he didn’t really write, he was blind at this point and so dictated to a scribe)
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
In a wildly reductive description of a part of the human condition; the world, events and interactions is one melange of ideas that we experience. This is then mirrored (firstly) in real time by our internal experience that goes through the filtration process of ascertaining how we will chew on these things and decides our first response to them. Oddly this operates not as a Rosetta stone, but more of a birdcage. The canary, our canary, (let’s go with canary as it adds to further layers of metaphors, if you’ll allow me) behind bars, warbles it’s song and the tempo, rhythm and general tune explains our experiences in our own language. We trust the canary, like a familiar, up and down the pits and mines, in and through the thin air and the sunshine.
The birdcage though, can rapidly take on more of its titular cage-like construct. It can become a voice of oppression and suppression. A back-seat driver with a paranoid distrust and dislike for all other cars on the road, an Iago, a Nurse Ratched. The gallows monologue of choice.
Unfortunately the monologue is how we will tell ourselves about ourselves. The monologue, the canary, becomes the loud and pervasive prison warden.
I’ve not met a single individual suffering who hasn’t tried all they know to change this fact. The longer the suffering continues and as the attempts yield no discernible change the harder and lonelier it gets. Time creeps in to tell you that whatever happens next has to be the right option, you can’t keep getting it wrong. How dare you sit in the sunshine and eat an apple? You love both those things? The buttery warmth soaking into your skin and the crunch of a small reddish apple, maybe on a quiet bench somewhere? How. Dare. You. The warden mocks you, destroys the idea, you should be working on yourself it says, not doing this.
Here is where I take my stand, it’s not a big one but it is rooted in rebelliousness, the guerrilla warfare approach. I’m going to do this. I’m going to eat an apple and think about eating an apple and why I enjoy eating apples. Perhaps, it’ll play the cinema reel of all the apples I’ve ever partook in. Mindfullness practitioners will tell me that I’m practising mindfulness but that’s not remotely rebellious and my desire to do what I’m told will be good for me is not wonderfully developed.
So it is about introducing the joyful. That might be as simple as allowing yourself a conversation about something you love. If all your sails are full of air and driving your ship forward, you give yourself time to discuss the things you love, and share your fears and dreams and pull into dock once in a while, knowing that you can pause and when you set sail again the winds will be with you. Though when your ships lies heavy in the doldrums, stuck in relentless and excruciating stasis, there is no time for this. There is little room for anything but the single focus of waiting for change.
My philosophy around joy is about finding those little spaces and giving them time. Coaching can act a lot like Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Bringing levity into a place that hasn’t seen much brightness and lightness for some time.
