Joy: to experience great pleasure or delight  — Merriam-Webster

As life moves me towards the age of fifty, I find myself reflecting on how I define joy. We often ask each other, “Did you enjoy this?” and “Are you enjoying that?” without perhaps thinking about what these questions mean to us individually.

Merriam-Webster goes on to define joy in three ways. There is an outward expression of joy that arises out of “good-fortune or success,” and there is that more inward state of being that is equated to “bliss.” In the middle is “happiness.”

I have found that as I reach into the arms of life at fifty, none of these definitions of joy quite work for me. Instead, see the moments of life that open me.

Let me try to explain.

A few nights ago, I had a dream: I was sitting with a new teacher, and we were reviewing my life resume. “Well,” she said, “you didn’t finish your PhD, but you wrote this book, and then this book, and then this book…”

You might think, after reading this, that I am about to define the joy I have discovered in my life by the definition of “good-fortune or success,” but I am not.

If I did, I would count reviews and book sales and find lack. I would turn towards an outward refection of success and find how unsettling this constant climb really is.

No, joy has found me in more subtle, but meaningful ways. For me, fifty years of joy have given me moments like this:

I am seven months pregnant, dancing in the living room with my child in my belly. Just the two of us. Complete union. Joy.

I am sitting on the sofa, looking into my teenager’s eyes filled with the sorrow of heartache. It is the middle of the day, but it is also morning. It is also night. The days turn into weeks, and we are brought together, again and again to experience this part of life. Distilled moments of union, communing in raw openness. Also joy.

I am standing in the moors of England, my hand pressed against an ancient stone. The wind fights my hair and tears run with sorrow down my cheeks, but I am hardly aware of myself. Instead, I am experiencing life beyond me. Memories of lives in all their extremes move through me in waves of connection, slipping through time and space. It is happiness, and sorrow, and everything in between. The joy of openness, which is connection.

I am sitting at an old, antique desk I found years ago with my husband on Craig’s List in our hunt to build my dream. It is at the end of a small alcove, my office. The walls around me are a soft purple hung with gifts of friendship and love. I am writing words to fill the pages of my fourth book. In this moment, I don’t care about how many eyes will read them, I am filled with the harmony of the flow of life that ebbs and rushes. I am an active part of creation in a sacred space. Joy.

I am standing still in the forest with my beloved dog beside me while nature moves around us. I can hear the song of birds and the wind moving through the trees. I can feel the light that is outside of me, inside of me. I am still, but I am moving. I am the energy that is my life as a part of all life. A temporary form, constantly changing as it sheds and grows. Releases and renews. Life recycling and living, over and over again. Unity without ending: the joy of being. The light of life = delight.

Someone I care deeply about has recently died. She was a friend, a mentor, a mother figure and a kindred spirit all wrapped into one human form. Her loss was not sudden, but too soon. I am grieving in uncharted territory while reading a blog post she wrote before her passing. Her presence is alive within her words, and I watch as the light on my screen fades and dims, then brightens again, seemingly of its own accord. She is the “light behind the story.” The light that never fades, which is the pure joy of life.

I am sitting inside a home infused with love in all its forms. The walls hold the laughter of joy and the shrieks of sorrow, and everything in between. Outside, nature breathes through the windows a constant promise of renewal. I sit amidst life, writing, but also participating. I am the witness and the participant. I am a part of all that is and ever will be. I am the joy of being.

And it is always enough