star above the trees. Standing next to one another in a line, we looked across the sky and one of us asked whether any other stars could be seen. There were none. We realized that there was just this one exceedingly bright shining star in the sky. Gazing at the star, we felt as if Dustin had met us there, that he’d allowed that single star to be seen in the sky so that we would know he was all right. It was not the kind of relief we wanted for him. But for a few minutes, we allowed the tragedy of what had occurred in this very space just two days before to hang in the background, and we instead focused on the star. We were filled with a kind of transformative, quiet joy. And we all gave ourselves over to this moment. As scholar Adam Potkay noted in his 2007 book “The Story of Joy,” “joy is an illumination,” the ability to see beyond to something more. Similarly, Nel Noddings, Stanford professor and author of the 2013 book “Caring,” describes joy as a feeling that “accompanies a realization of our relatedness.” What Noddings meant by relatedness was the special feeling we get from caring about other people or ideas. Joy is also the feeling that can arise from sensing kinship with others, experiencing harmony between what we are doing and our values, or seeing the significance in an action, a place, a conversation, or even an inanimate object. When I teach about joy, I use an example from my family to explain this. When my sister looks at a Mason jar now – whether in someone’s hand filled with tea or bursting with flowers on a friend’s coffee table – it reminds her of her son Mason. It is not just an object she is seeing, but a relationship imbued with beauty, goodness, and meaning. It gives her a feeling that can be described only as joy.
FINDING GRATITUDE•EDITION 11 NO. 4•THEMILLMAGAZINE.COM
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