Joy
Live life with joy, and live your own life. Embrace each morning, give thanks every evening. With your own mind, think your own thoughts. Grant liberty to your own heart. Give heart to the reality of your body. Take pleasure in those you meet, and revel in both the unique and the common bond. Let every child be a child, and let childhood speak its own truth. And while those grown who are truly joyful may seem as children or fools to the dour and overserious, let the lack of understanding rob you of nothing. But share if you can and others are willing.
Do not attempt to admonish anyone to be positive. Just as trust is a gift that is allowed you, happiness is a gift you allow yourself. Treating the sorrow of another as an assault on you gives injury to trust. Be honest with yourself about what you can handle in others, but treat them fairly and with compassion. If you are the unhappy one, be patient with yourself. Whatever route you may find out of your sadness surely cannot involve punishing yourself for your feelings.
Seek joy in the small and in the grand picture. Know you are loved, even when you do not feel it. Show kindness to others, even when it is hardest to do so, because this is when they need it most. Find satisfaction in the accomplishments of others, as their success is your success. When others are glad for your good tidings, let their celebration reach you. Honor justice as bestower of rights and freedoms, not only as distributor of burdens and consequences.
Whatever we may create, manage, or change in a lifetime, joy is the reason to live. Even the most noble purpose is ash without some joy to be found in the striving for or fulfilling of it. Much of life is harsh, but if service to God required no joy, we would all be condemned to serve in Hell from the outset of our existence.
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