A Journey with Joy

by Andrew Arnott

Pleasure is something that comes easily: biting into a ripe persimmon, the smell of freshly cut grass, soft linen on bare skin, and Alpine valleys the Tour de France keeps reminding me of. Pleasure belongs in the body, it’s accessible, and simple. Satiate a sense gate and you’ll experience pleasure.

Joy is something else, quite difficult to articulate and, I realise, largely unfamiliar. Inherently, I seek harmony, I’m wired for ease, inner-stillness, peace and coherence, I don’t like loud, brash noise, and I like it even less in people.  My conjecture is that joy is an amplification of pleasure - turn pleasure all the way up, and you get joy. Joy feels loud, and it feels risky. Zadie Smith describes joy as something disruptive, fierce and inconvenient, and I feel the truth in that and, in consideration, I realise that I’m fundamentally afraid of joy.

When joy arrives, it is unannounced and disarmoring. It is an experience of self-forgetting, and only afterwards do I remember what I had forgotten.

A vivid memory of joy is in the Khumbu Valley in northeastern Nepal. My guide and I set out before sunrise, pacing across frozen earth to reach the top of Renjo La Pass for sunrise. The temperature had dropped to minus seventeen overnight, and the prefab tea house didn’t offer much in the way of insulation. At 4800m, moving is a slow, methodical plod. A headlamp beam lights your field of vision, and the ground is slippery. After thirty minutes, we began tracing the switch-back path leading to the summit. There’s a good measure of caution going up these steep passes as the exposed side of the trail is a steep drop, and I’m not a fan of heights. One would think that after so much exposure to mountain edges, I’d have a more integrated relationship with vertigo, but sadly, this is not the case.

I could feel how sweaty my hands were inside my gloves, gripping onto my walking poles, and my breath was short and shallow in the thin air. We’d stop every fifteen minutes to catch our breath, or rather, for me to catch mine. My guide seemed to glide up. After an hour of climbing, the sky started to take on the indigo hue of predawn. The safe cloak of darkness lifted, revealing the harrowing path we had taken. I tend to focus on my feet in situations like this, taking stock of where the next step will land to mitigate the disorientation of height.

A few minutes later, we came over the summit.

What I experienced here was immediately simple and incredibly complex to describe. Renjo La Pass, at 5360 metres, looks directly East. The pass falls away to the striking turquoise Gokyo Lake that amplifies the raw, earthy tones of the surrounding rock. On the horizon, the snow-capped giants Lhotse, Makalu, and Everest penetrate the heavens. At this hour, the sun emerges behind Everest, a slow bloom of light that fills the valley below, catching the peaks and mesmerising the few of us on the pass to witness this spectacle.

Facing the scale and silence is wild, a dismantling of self to reveal an untamed soul that is boundless. My cheeks were wet, my heart unbounded, and I felt flooded with awe. It broke me open.

This is joy.

It arrives like a weather system at full volume, without warning, and overrides the carefully spun web of personality to expose essence, and this is discombobulating, to experience the vastness of self, the vertigo within.

Reflecting on joy, I’m aware of the ego dissolution that accompanies it. I think that’s what’s so confronting about it. In pleasure, I remain myself, I get to stay intact.  In joy, I come undone. This alerts me to how tightly I’m gripping onto my identity, the ‘I’ being a totem to the ego. I’m rigidly trying to control my experience of life, I’m afraid of what will happen if I let go. Instead, I moderate, temper and stay composed with a disciplined approach to my experiences. Quickly looking for the familiar terrain of calm and safety.

I hear the invitation to surrender, often spoken flippantly, “surrender to the experience.” I know what that means, allowing myself to feel everything in that moment, but it’s difficult for someone who has constructed a precarious Jenga-tower of identity by minimising emotions. When joy arrives, it sweeps that structure off the table and saturates the system with every emotion available in the moment.

As a child, I felt joy frequently. There were days spent almost entirely in my imagination. Long, wandering games where time disappeared and the boundaries between the world and the story I narrated dissolved. I wasn’t trying to be anyone, I just was. I miss that time of life. Sometime ago, I haphazardly mentioned to my brother that “life peaked at twelve.” He laughed and agreed. Those simple days before the long-distance all-boys boarding school that prioritised survival rather than imaginative expansion. A loss of innocence coupled with the onset of puberty and the fixation of identity. Boarding school didn’t reward feelings, instead, it rewarded emotional economy, self-sufficiency and blending in. Imagination gave way to endurance. Joy felt risky in those days.

Twelve was the last age I lived with my parents. I’d return home three times a year during term breaks and Christmas holidays until I went to university, and then I departed for the UK for a decade. My independence taught me vigilance, an emotional tightening, something I have struggled to surrender.  I became good at reading the room, at anticipating expectations, and at managing my own needs so they wouldn’t become burdensome to others. That vigilance made me competent, resilient, and even successful, it also made me wary of being too open.

I notice that when I ruminate on my early childhood, those first twelve years, and touch on the moments of joy that punctuate my experience of myself, I realise how much I long for that essence, those moments when I’m released from defensiveness, when I can expand beyond the confines of ego.

My relationship with joy is not one of rejection, it’s one of caution because it challenges everything I have convinced myself of. I long for it, but only on my terms, only when I feel safe, and that’s precisely where joy doesn’t live. It lives at the end of dark, winding paths that are mainly navigated on faith.