Not an inner experience that you can manipulate yourself into having.
Joy isn’t primarily something that you do to yourself, but something that is done to you. Joy is an internal reaction to some sort of outside, external stimulus. Joy is an effect, not a cause.
Joy often eludes you when you try to go directly it it.
Because of that, you can, in a sense, let yourself become more “accident prone”. You can set yourself up to stumble into joy. To trip over joy. To take life a little less seriously, to walk through life a little less carefully, to engage the world a little less rigidly, so that maybe joy might surprise you.
You can choose to pay less attention to the wrong things in order for the right things to sneak up on you when you least expect it. You can choose to pay less attention to the big things in order for the little things to catch you off guard. After all, it’s often little things in life — those things that so easily go unnoticed — that bring us the deepest joy.
Joy is an accident. But the very best kind of accident.
