Call to Joy

Every breath is a call to the joy of consciousness. If I’m afraid of that consciousness coming to an end, or try to think of ways I can hold onto it forever, the joy immediately slips away. Joy then becomes just one more word in a numbing, distracting intellectual exercise in which I’m both martyr and hero. When that happens, the moment simply goes on without me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m lost in the past, or preoccupied with an imagined or desired future. Either way, by fearing for and clinging to my identity, I am absent. And being absent, I become exactly that which I am trying to avoid. I become tired and joyless, a victim of my own busy, ungrateful mind.

December 2, 2021

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