Jenny has been realizing that she associates joy with superficial or unproductive. If work is joyful, then it is fun but frivolous. It can't be producing anything of real value. Emotional growth, or the gaining of any kind of insight or understanding, needs to be painful or it isn't substantial. If it isn't "serious," then she can't take it seriously. As we do this exercise, we are beginning to challenge the dichotomy between serious and joyful. What does it mean to be serious? Can joyful also be serious?
As an art student, Jenny once shared with her teacher that she saw the process of making art as one that needed to entail great suffering. Otherwise, she could not feel that she had reached anything "deep" or worth saying. Her teacher suggested that she probably wasn't going to find being an artist a whole lot of fun. As we investigate the ground of joy, noticing what enables and what constrains our natural capacity to be joyful, we are finding that there are many different kinds of joy, some passionate, some bittersweet, some energetic, some calm, and so on. We wonder if there might not be a joy for every occasion – a sad joy, a cool joy, and perhaps even a serious joy. We leave it as an open question.
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