Perhaps one of the best parts of parenting is when you are able to participate in the pure joy your child experiences, especially when your child happens to be a teenager. There are many cool aspects of parenting, and there are likely as many or maybe more challenges that come with parenting. Maybe that’s why the moments when I witness my teenagers experiencing those joy-filled moments, the ones wrapped in the blissful combination of anticipation and excitement, it translates into a bit of joy-filled delight for me.
I realized recently that we tend to classify our days as good and bad based on whether they were hard or easy, busy or not busy. We don’t look at the day’s results, at what happened; instead we measure our emotions in relation to the day. Was it a hard day? Then it must have also been a bad day, a rough day, a day requiring more rest or downtime or decompression. Was it an easy day? Oh, then it was probably a good day. But I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to work. I think our judgments of good and bad should be related more to our choices—how we chose to react and respond to our day. I don’t know, maybe I’m simply waxing philosophical here, but I truly believe we have more power over joy and delight and the related anticipation and excitement than we realize.
Maybe that’s why the scene in Inside Out 2 hits so hard every time I watch it. I know it hits my 17 year old similarly, piercing us to the core and inviting tears to fall. As Anxiety gets a stronger and stronger hold on Riley, influencing her choices and her emotions, the original emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust are trying to make their way back to Headquarters to stop Anxiety. To break Anxiety’s hold on Riley. As the five emotions consider what’s next, Joy says,
I don’t know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can’t. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy.
~ Joy, Inside Out 2
Can that possibly be true? I say no.
Can you even imagine? I can’t. Maybe it’s because I tend toward the eternal optimist end of the spectrum when it comes to how one views the world. Regardless, I have always believed we hold more influence over our emotions than we realize, including and especially joy. Joy is tied directly to gratitude and also to faith. Joy is different from happiness, which I will agree can be fleeting. Happiness tends to be associated with positive life experiences. Joy, on the other hand, is rooted both within us and beyond us, and, because of this, is less dependent on circumstances, negative or positive. In fact, I have seen some people who are joyful in spite of their circumstances that have involved great challenges.
This is what I want to impart to my girls. It’s what I want to infuse in them, but I realize that isn’t something I can do so much as something I can model. It is one of those things that has to be caught, not taught. It’s why I practice gratitude and why I practice celebrating joy no matter what. It’s a bit like choosing to love someone with a no-matter-what kind of love. It requires something of me. So does joy. For me, it is rooted in my faith; it pours out from the Father who loves me and provides me glimpses of beauty and wonder. Joy encourages me to live in anticipation of those glimpses. Joy requires me to slow down and shift my perspective and look at the world differently, to really see the world and its wonders—a hawk flying overhead and landing on a telephone wire, a butterfly lighting on a spring blossom, the sparkle in a loved one’s eyes when they experience their own anticipation, excitement, or joy.
Today, that was one of my joy-filled moments and the moment I opted to focus on here. Moments with either girl whose anticipation for something morphed into excitement and delight and that created happiness. That for me reinforced a sense of joy intertwined with gratitude for the gift I knew it was from God, the source of my strength and my joy always. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy. Those words invite sadness because I believe this can be true for too many people; but I still firmly and truly believe it doesn’t have to be true. It’s about choices and perspective. That’s why at the end of the movie, I love the writing for its powerful words: Joy, she’s asking for you. May my two amazing teenagers know they canchoose joy, and may they welcome that joy into their hearts and minds always.