There’s a chair in my living room that has seen more indecision than most philosophers. It’s a sturdy old thing, the kind you sit in when you’re not sure if you should be leaving the house or staying in. I bought it secondhand, and it came with its own set of creaks and groans, much like the rest of us.
The other day I found myself sinking into it, not out of necessity but because I had a feeling — a rare, unbidden sense of okay-ness. I wasn’t doing anything particularly worthy of joy. I wasn’t finishing a manuscript or saving the world one sentence at a time. I was just… there.
Years of hyper-vigilance have trained me to scan for the next disaster. Joy, when it arrives, is often a suspicious guest. It saunters in without an invitation, plops on the couch, and dares me to question its motives. But this time, I didn’t. I let it sit, maybe because it didn’t promise to stick around. It was the absence of tension, not the presence of fireworks.
It’s a strange skill, letting joy just be. We are often taught that it must be earned, that it needs to follow a narrative arc with a climax and resolution. But joy is more like jazz — non-linear, messy, and always a little off-beat.
And in that moment, I didn’t ask it for its ID or its purpose. I didn’t try to dress it up as something it wasn’t. I just let it sit there, in the creaky chair, in my creaky life, as unassuming as a muscle unclenching. The world could wait.