In a 1965 Reader’s Digest article, “Overtaken by Joy,” Ardis Whitman recounts sitting on a train beside an elderly gentleman who was staring out the window at the passing landscape. Both commented on its beauty, and then he called Whitman’s attention to a hay wagon they were passing, “as if there could be no greater event in all the world.” When Whitman gave him a puzzled look, the man said: “You think it’s strange that just a hay wagon means so much. But you see, last week the doctor told me that I have only three months to live. Ever since, everything has looked so beautiful, so important to me. You can’t imagine how beautiful! I feel as if I had been asleep and had only just waked up!”
Most of us don’t become as swept up by joy as Scrooge, and most of us aren’t at present in danger of dying, yet most of us have surely experienced moments when we were suddenly seized by some inexplicable joy that seemingly materialized out of nowhere. An ocean sunset, the faces and chatter of our children or grandchildren at play, the out-of-the-blue kindness shown us by a stranger—all these and more can move us to tears or laughter and even leave us wordless.
But what of those inexplicable flashes of delight that make us feel, to paraphrase the man on the train, as if we had been asleep and had suddenly awakened? What of those lightning bolts of utter bliss that strike us at random moments? Are we able to unwrap the gift of profound joy more often than we do?
When Joy Comes Knocking, Open the Door
One recent evening, after I’d turned off the lamp in my den, a bright light shone through the sliding glass doors. Curious, I stepped outside onto the deck and found the lawn awash in moonlight and soft shadows. I stood spellbound for several minutes, simply drinking in this landscape and its gentle beauty. Everything else, all my worries over deadlines and obligations, disappeared, erased, at least for the moment, by that conjunction of light and shadow.
In her article, Whitman tells the story of a young mother who, like so many people today, especially millennials, is rushing to get breakfast on the table for her husband and children. Nothing was different from the many times she had performed these tasks, but on this particular morning, she suddenly paused and “as she looked at them, she was suddenly so overcome by how much she loved them, by her feeling of good fortune, that she could scarcely speak for joy.”
Repeat the Sensation
For the next three nights, the weather was clear, moonlight drenched the yard, and I’d step outside. Each one of those visits flooded me with this same sense of awe and ecstasy, scarcely diminished by repetition.If she recollected her own moment of awe and wonder granted her by the faces of her children and husband at the breakfast table, that mother might have easily revisited again and again the unabashed joy she’d felt that morning in her kitchen.
Whatever this season of holidays and winter months has in store for us, such recollected joys can act as medicine against fear, despair, and the post-Christmas blues. As Whitman writes: “The more grievous the world, the more we need to remember the luminous beauty at the center of life. Our moments of joy are proof that at the heart of darkness an unquenchable light shines.”
