What happens to our joy? When we are kids, it’s with us all the time. Everything is wonderful and awe inspiring.

We often look back on the past and think ‘oh, they were the days’ when joy bubbles rose in our chests, as we travelled the world and were ‘fancy free’ without a ‘care in the world’. Then we turn around and life seems like hard work. We miss the selves we used to be, the lovers we used to be. We’re busy, impatient, inattentive to each other’s needs in total preoccupation with all the ‘stuff’ that we imagine life has thrown at us.

We seem to have misplaced our joy somewhere, and dammit, we want it back.

When I met my heart-love, it was love at first sight. I’m not even joking. Here’s me, ultra-independent feminist, never giving up my last name to a man, totally fed up with men in general, travelling in the UK, and he walks into the room and my heart goes boom-boom and I’m thinking: first, I’m going to shag him, and then I’m going to marry him. That was the actual thought that went through my head, and it knocked me for six.

I’m sorry if this offends your sensibilities, and I know spending a night with someone after you’ve known them for a few hours might not be your cup of tea, but this is the way it went for us and we’ve made a pretty wholesome life for ourselves despite morally questionable shenanigans that brought us together. We also feel it was quite blessed, as it was Winter Solstice and we went off to a gig at Glastonbury Town Hall, and I remember we stopped half way there for a roadside pee as my belly was full of cider. The wind was bitter and in the background there was the Tor rising up out of the darkness, backlit by a wintery moon, and for an Australian girl in love with Arthurian legend it was liking seeing God. All these sparks were flying between us, the two inches between us on the back seat electrified.

Talking about electricity, he wasn’t even meant to be there – he’d connected the battery wrong on his truck and blew his alternator, which was a crazy thing to do given his mechanical skills. One moment of inattention that determined the course of our lives. His sister, whose house he was parked at, who was besties with a girl who was going out with a guy who’d I’d met years ago in Australia where he was backpacking. Degrees of separation and all that. Anyway, the next day (you really don’t want to know the details of that night – it was crazy and lovely and involved dancing to Zion Train, a dub reggae band who we’d gone to see, some illicit substances and being glued together under a borrowed duvet on the couch) we all piled into a car and drove down to Dorset to stay at a beautiful beach called Ringstead where our other mutual friends lived. Honest to God it was cold, and my lungs were suffering from too many roll-ups the night before (we gave up smoking a long time ago now!) and still, I followed this gorgeous man up the cliff at White Nothe and there was no way I was letting him out of my sight.

We knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. We told each other we loved each other on the second morning, dizzy with love and lack of sleep and impulsiveness. By the third night, on New Year’s night after a week’s absence from each other, we were smitten. We woke on the fourth day and he gave me a stone wherein was marked the universe, quartz against black flint, and told me he’d given me his entire world. We walked across ice blanketed fields to a pub, he bought me a whisky mac, and we agreed we’d get married and move to country England.

When he left me at the train station in Brighton, as I needed to go back to Australia and organise my life, I told him I’d be back in 6 months. I got back in four, and we married within the year. The years that followed were crazy, beautiful, golden. There’s too much to write about in this post and I could probably spare you the details (I’ve probably lost a lot of you already!) but I could absolutely say they were full of joy – a bright, shining, sparkly joy reserved for lovers and wild spirits meeting each other for the first time.

Then, life. Raising our lad. Buying a house and land in Australia. Tending the land. Building and creating. Working hard. Taking on projects, responsibilities. Still, there’s joy – oh, absolutely there is joy. But there’s a tarnish to it. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve made ourselves harden, because life can be tough – there’s arguments, and family members becoming ill, and hard decisions we need to make about careers and finances. All of our attention becomes divided into small pieces and is no longer wholly on each other. We tend to our relationship when we find the time, and look forward to holidays longingly, when we know we can be together whole heartedly, devotedly again, in love again. Smitten.

It’s like an object of beauty. Something you treasure. Something that catches the light. It’s always there, always loved, but sometimes it’s just hidden away in a cupboard gathering dust.

As I was writing the above lines, Jamie came in and said ‘look what I found’ and I couldn’t believe the synchronicity of what he was showing me. It’s a Moroccan serving dish we picked up at a charity shop years ago. We used to have it behind the wood-burner in the truck as it was beautiful and caught the firelight. For some reason, it’s been hidden in the shed, gathering dust, collecting splashes of paint. For the last half hour, Jamie had been polishing it to bring it inside to put by the fire. The attention he was giving it was revealing the golden brass beneath.

Maybe that’s what joy is – the attention we give things.

In yoga and meditation, we bring the focus to our breath so that all else fades away. The sharp pointed focus on the in breath and out breath brings us away from attachments and desires and towards a deep internal joy and bliss. Because we’re addicted to sweetness – to sukha - joy in pleasurable things, when they can be taken away in a heartbeat, we suffer - duhkha . We’re always longing for what we think we have lost, or what we think will bring us joy. Happiness and joy are fleeting, and they are inevitably followed by sadness – this is the duality consciousness that we feel in our daily lives because we are human. And when our joy is dependent on external circumstances, it will always come and go. So what is the use of saying ‘oh! When we first met, our life was full of joy!’? We are attaching to a moment rather than being in the real joy of being in this moment to moment experience.

The joy we find in our life is there, alright. Jamie gets all zen and the art of landrover maintenance, totally absorbed and focussed, his concentration absolute. He comes in with eyes shining: ‘Look! I got that bolt off!’ (after six hours attempting to do so, swearing somewhat and knocking skin off knuckles – the suffering is followed by joy, every time) and we absorb ourselves in other tasks – the laundry, the dishes, the garden. This is where we find the joy. Thic Nhat Han says:

Washing the dishes

is like bathing a baby Buddha.

The profane is the sacred.

What he means is this:

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes, one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
While washing dishes, you might be thinking about the tea you’re going to drink afterwards, and so try to get them out of the way as quickly as possible in order to sit and drink tea. But that means that you are incapable of living during the time you are washing the dishes. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you’re drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.

When we first met, we were the most important things in each other’s lives. We like to think we still are, and if we had to sacrifice all the other things that occupy us, just to be together, we would. On that drive down to Dorset, our eyes never left each other – I didn’t see the hills, the road, the sky. I couldn’t have found my way back if I tried – all my attention was on this beautiful man that would smile and wait patiently as I wheezed myself up a hill to be with him.

If we totally gave each task loving attention, including each other, how much light will shine through? How much joy there is – as long as our attention is in the right spot. How much joy.