The constitution of the United States guarantees all citizens the right to the "pursuit" of happiness. Not the "experience" of happiness, or the "finding" of happiness.   The pursuit. We all know what pursuit is... chasing after something that's running away from you as fast as its stumpy legs can carry it. They might as well have added after "pursuit of happiness," "Lots of luck!"

And yet, people spend their lives trying to catch up with happiness. When they occasionally do, it turns out to be very ephemeral and the minute you take your eye off it, it's off and running again. I've always thought that a great bumper stick would be "Happiness Is My Next Purchase." Except nobody would buy it (which would dissprove the premise.) The creators of the constitution were very wise men. They didn't even offer any hope of pursuing "joy." That's probably because you can't really pursue joy. Joy happens.

So, what is joy? Got joy? I didn't bother to look it up in the dictionary. Words in the dictionary are like butterflies pinned to a mounting board. You get the bare facts, but often the life is taken out of it. How can you know a butterfly without a summer breeze? Words are like that. They don't radiate their full meaning when pinned in a book. You can find out what the root of the word is, and what is considered the correct useage, but he subtleties are lost. Take for example two related words that have "joy" as their root... "rejoice" and "enjoy." Now, rejoice is exuberant.. shout out loud, joyful. Uncontainable joy. "Enjoy" is much more vapid. If a movie critic says that a movie was "enjoyable," it's not much more of a recommendation than "nice" or even worse, "interesting." Now true joy is a totally different animal.

When you look at your life and think of those times when you've experienced true joy, did it happen because you were actively pursing
it? You can pursue pleasure. We all do that. When I think of the joyful times in my life, they all seem to grow out of some basic qualities. The first is love. Love is what creates joy when I hold my wife in my arms, or I embrace one of my sons after I haven't seen them for many months. Giving can create joy, too. When my gospel quartet gave a concert for one in the home of a recently widowed women in her 90's who went blind shortly after she lost her husband, it was joyful. Not just for her, but for us. Giving has a way of doing that. The third way that I find joy is in creating. All Mudcatters know that joy. I can feel the joy that Bill D experiences when he is turning a bowl on a lathe and he sees the beauty of the form that he is creating with his own hands. We've all felt that at special times when we unexpectedly find a beautiful chord progression or a line to a song that we're writing that we know didn't just come from our own mind.

When I wrote Handful of Songs many years ago, the one line that I had the most discomfort with was "It's not what you leave, it's the joy of remembering." At that time in my life, joy seemed like an unnatainable goal. As difficult to catch as a butterfly. Most days, just not feeling miserable was an improvement. I kept trying to find another way to express myself... "It's the moderately pleasing emotion of remembering," "It the happiness of remembering.." Nothing really worked. Looking back, it says a lot about who I was then that I felt intimidated by using the word joy. I figured that it would sound phony. Holden Caulfield would have snorted at the word. But, even if I didn't have a lot of joy in my life back then, it still seemed like the right word. Now, the line says exactly what I want it to say.

So, what about you folks? What gives you real JOY in your life? Any thoughts that you want to share will be appreciated.

Jerry