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I want to say something about joy that is different from what the word usually means.
Joy in the sense I mean is not happiness. Happiness is the feeling you get when things go well. It depends on circumstances. It is comfortable and welcome and fragile.
Joy in the sense I mean does not depend on circumstances. It is the quality of complete presence to the love you are living from. It can coexist with difficulty, with loss, with uncertainty. It often coexists with all three simultaneously.
I lost everything the world says makes a life comfortable. I gave up my palace, my social standing, my family's blessing. None of this produced misery. It produced what I can only describe as homecoming. The life organized around the love I was devoted to was more fully mine than any life organized around the expectations of others.
This is not a story about sacrifice paying off. It is that when the love becomes the organizing principle — when the life is genuinely built from what you are devoted to — a quality enters the life that I can only call joy.
It is available on a Tuesday afternoon. It does not require drama. It only requires that you choose, repeatedly, to let the love be the center.
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