I’ve been ruminating (we writers don’t just think about things… we go the extra mile and ruminate) on joy.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the last eight years have been a dumpster fire. Slogging through four years of an administration diametrically opposed to me and Mark and everything we believe in, followed by a pandemic from hell and years of inflation… it’s been hard to feel anything other than rank despair.
This long interregnum has been punctuated by brief windows of hope – when our new President entered the Oval Office, when a vaccine let us creep outside of our confinement to engage with the world once again. But these were few and far between, and I often felt like hope alone wasn’t enough.
For me personally, there’s been a layering of fears and worries weighing me down – dread about another Trump administration, Generative AI that threatens our jobs, and in the longer term, the ever-looming threat of climate change. Each of these is thick and deep, smothering my soul. Add dear friends with cancer, a never-ending job hunt, and a stifling feeling of stuckness that seems impossible to shake off, and it’s no wonder I’ve felt weighed down for so long.
Each of us has these lists of things that weigh on us, and it doesn’t matter if yours is shorter or longer than mine, or if your burden is lighter or heavier. Together, we hope that things will get better, always striving to find ways to make that happen.
And yet, nothing seems to change.
Then, like a thunderbolt out of the blue, our whole world shifted. President Biden stepped down, doing what he thought was best for the country instead of for himself, and faster than I would ever have imagined, Democratics coalesced around the Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Suddenly there was hope where there had been none. And not just hope.
Joy.
Psychologists talk about something called sense of foreshortened future. It’s the feeling that there is no future, that things have gotten so bad that nothing good will ever come again. Once a fairly rare psychological phenomenon, it’s something billions of us experienced together during the pandemic, a shared bonding that reshaped the world, as we made our decisions based not in hope but on a fatalistic worldview that we were all doomed.
But now something miraculous has happened. That thunderbolt from the blue has shifted the foundations of the world, and in the process has brought back a feeling of joy, and the possibility of a better future.
It’s not that Harris is destined to win. I’ve seen far too much darkness in the world to let myself be too eager, too hopeful.
It’s that she has a fighting chance. That we all have that fighting chance to recenter our world on things that matter. Truth. Respect. Love. And action. We’re not going back.
The joy her campaign has sown in me has almost erased one of those heavy blankets weighing me down – the fear of Donald Trump. Somehow she and Walz have managed to strip the Emperor of his clothes, and he seems so much smaller without them.
Without that weight, everything in my life feels a little lighter.
And so, here I am listening to one of the most joyous songs ever made – Mickey, by Toni Basil. Google it if you are too young to remember it. It’s silly, bubbly-infectious, and practically reeks of joy. I am up on my feet, dancing with joy and abandon.
I’m wondering how I ever lived without it.
For at least today, everything is good. And maybe tomorrow, too.