I had this whole post written about fortitude this week and after I wrote it all, I felt more inclined to talk about JOY! And how we can choose joy even in our hardest moments. And that led me to think about how it’s like a muscle. The Joy Muscle. It may sound ridiculous but stay with me for a moment.
In order to strengthen a muscle, it must be torn. It must be forced to it’s limits and slight tears must be created in that moment. Sounds terrible, right? But what happens afterwards is incredible. As the body heals or recovers, those tiny tears start to heal over. But they don’t simply line up perfectly again, those fibers heal by building a bridge from one side of the tear to the other, creating a larger and stronger muscle.
It makes me think of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with gold, silver, or platinum. “As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”
I once went to a museum that had an exhibit showcasing Kintsugi, but I didn’t truly understand what I was looking at till the end. It was just beautiful artwork that I was viewing. I didn’t realize that the bowl I was admiring which was laced with precious metal wasn’t being displayed as expensive art in someone’s home. It was their everyday breakfast bowl. It held their milk and fruit loops.
They had taken something completely ordinary and made it extraordinary. They made it precious. To be admired. To be better and stronger than before. Can we do that with the joy muscle? The more we push our limits searching for and choosing joy around every bend, the easier it’ll be to do the next time, right?
Today, the world seems to be trying to crack and tear us down, but if we continue to fill those tears and cracks with joy the more golden our lives will be.
The metaphor is a bit of a reach, I’ll grant you that, but I think it has some merit. As I like to tell my friends when the movie plot is just a little too far out there, you have to “believe in the magic.”
Here’s to choosing Joy this week.
Go in grace and God bless,
Colleen
