Joy is a Signpost

The secret of Happiness

I am a self-confessed joy-lover and up until recently I used to think that the point of life was to be happy, that the point of life was to feel joy. I have lived a non-linear life of intensity and adventure. I have never had a proper 9-5 job, salary, career or boss, I have never tried to climb the company ladder or attain success in the conventional sense of the word. My life has been colourful and adventurous, I spent many years travelling the world and have collected many many ‘been-there-and-got-the-t-shirt’ moments.

And I have had a lot of ‘fun’, felt a lot of giddy, hedonistic sex, drug, intensity, novelty and risk-fuelled excitement. But the deep, vivid, lucid and profound joy that lights up every cell,—you know, the good stuff—well that has been increasingly harder to create. In fact the more I chase it, the more it eludes me. Until I stop trying to find it, then suddenly, out of nowhere, it just appears, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

A few days ago during an adventure in Rio de Janeiro in the company of 11 other women with whom I have been living with whilst conducting evolutionary research about creating Next Culture. We had a wonderful day which ended at Ipanema beach watching the sunset, body-surfing the waves and running on the beach. A happy interlude from some intense days of meetings, Creating, and Liquid States. In the car on the way home we put on our favourite songs and were singing along, high on the fun and easefulness of the day. It might seem like a pretty normal moment, listening to music in a car with some friends. Then it happened. For perhaps 60 seconds I experienced a wave of bliss in my whole being. 

It was a crowning “This is my life and I love it” moment. I just knew in every sense of the word at that moment that this is exactly where I want to be and exactly what I want to be doing. And in this juicy fleeting moment of quiet magnificence, I finally got after all these years, the point of joy, which is not the point of life.

Now I realise that I had been going about it the wrong way around.

Joy is actually not the point, it’s the pointer. It is the arrow, the X on the map, the light-house on my journey illuminating the way, saying “Go!” You’re on a path that turns me on. It is the cue and fuel to follow my soul’s deepest longing to do what it really burns to do in this life. It is so obvious to me now that my happiness is not the end-goal in and of itself, nor is happiness a prize to be chased or earned.

So what is the joy for? The joy I get to feel serves as a celebration, an inspiration, and a motivation for me to carry on down my path and towards creating something that is so much bigger than me and my personal contentment.

And I feel pretty glad about that.