On What It Means To (En)Joy a Life...
What if you are a poet who has long forgotten how to enjoy a poem?
The other day while I was teaching, a student raised her hand to signal my attention. Her question was something along the lines of how she could get her essay with a few disparate ideas to flow a little better. I stopped for a moment and tilted my head up, as if I was trying to conjure my response from the ceiling. By the time I answered, the room fell into an easy laughter. I am familiar with this laughter, it has followed me since 2019, the first time I taught a class of College Freshmen. Back then, on my first day, I had appeared with a walking cane, having - in a fit of nervous haste - fallen down a flight of stairs that morning. My aim had been to say something disparaging, something that might explain my cane situation and therefore take their minds off my awkward stumble. The result? Laughter. I do not consider myself a funny person, though I have the occasional friendships here and there with people who have referred to me as hilarious. I think I have a healthy sense of personal humor, though it is often interior and though I know some of my private jokes would fall flat in public. I can also be quite taciturn and broody—in the words of another friend, intense. Certainly reflective. But occasionally there is me, and there is the haha quality about me.
I am going somewhere with this, which in one word I will call freedom, and in another, I will call joy. But first, a confession—I have neither felt freedom or joy in the past year or so. Okay, let me paraphrase because my position is a bit exaggerated. Forgive me? Still, what I mean by joy is not just the invocation of a profound feeling of satisfied delight, but more so in the practice of joy, in a kind of temporal, visceral experience of joy. Joy as it is enacted moment after moment. For instance, to say I have joy seems –to me—different from saying I’m enjoying a meal, or I’m enjoying my work. So yes, joy, but only in the sense of embodying specific activities.
And now to return to my point: I have neither felt a sense of freedom nor a sense of enjoyment in the last year or so. I am still exaggerating but please get the general gist.
For me, joy and freedom have almost always been inextricable connected. I get it when the philosophers say that humans are products of desire, in the sense that our appetites drive our sense of happiness. So we tend to see joy as the movement towards fulfilled desire; joy as a kind of completion, an ending. This sense of joy is much rooted in the material world, with goals and plans and timelines. And then, if you’re like me, with a hundred quiet hauntings, joy can feel like the elusive other side of fear; the state of desired tranquility where the world is a perfect symmetry of structured positive events.
In the last year or so, I have had a series of life-defining dreams start to come true. I signed with a wonderful literary agent and six months later, I sold my debut novel to dream publishers across three territories. A few months before I signed my first novel with my agent, my novel was not even complete. But here I am, a soon-to-be published author. Which is to say that things happened very quickly. In the weeks of some of these profound motions, I often found myself in bed happy with tears, grateful beyond words, beyond prayers of thanks. Still, in the immediate aftermath there it was again, a lull; me in a hurried distracted state, with the sense that I must attend to an infinite set of demands. I have stopped only long enough to ask: what does it mean to enjoy this season, to enjoy the world as it shapes up. Perhaps to enjoy the bloom of a flower in the aftermath of winter, to enjoy even the stickiness of summer with its humid smells; to enjoy a meal, to enjoy my time in the kitchen preparing that meal.
Another way to put it is to say that I feel tired. Or maybe to say that I am busy. That I find myself caught up in a strange universe of new things. That I am not known to be great with change. That I am in a doctoral program, and I have changed my research interest at least three times. That as a scholar who is interested in public-facing work, I often feel alienated from my peers—from that befuddling pipeline in which the rigorous work of academics travel from classroom to obscure journal. That as a lawyer I understand the precedent of citation in the universe of institutional epistemology, and the ways it ties into critical work, but as a fiction writer, well, I am interested in the voice and soul of every thought.
Yet, here is a contradiction: this past year has increased me like no other season of my life. And it has less to do with my creative output and more with the encounters I’ve had with confusing text.
Imagine this: To feel suffocated like a seed planted in soil, and yet to know that there is no other place you are meant to be.
This is what I’m learning:
In the face of purpose and growth, we need a revised apparatus for measuring joy, and for measuring what we enjoy. It may be true that what we know of a season depends on what is disclosed to us—sometimes we learn ourselves only in retrospect. What if enjoyment enacts itself after the fact? Notice how I separate joy with enjoyment. Because while enjoyment is fixed on affect, joy (at least to me) calls for a kind of material transcendence. What if, as some philosophers say, it is possible to have joy as an event unto itself? That we can occupy seasons of lull and inanity with a hopeful rejoicing. What if joy is a literal feeling but ALSO an act of faith? What if, you are like me, in a life of new and big things, all necessary but which seem to drown out the small pleasures? What if you are a poet who has long forgotten how to enjoy a poem?
Joy calls us to stubborn, radical, focus. Not to an object or feeling, but to an ideal—to freedom, where freedom is the resistance to labels and constraints of success. For me, this freedom calls me to enjoy a season without articulating to myself what this season is supposed to look like, what I am supposed to be doing, what my life and dreams and happiness is supposed to feel like. For me this freedom invites me to trust time, to trust the environment, to trust the source that brings answers to prayer.
In the meantime, I am learning so much from my students, which is to sometimes ignore the hard, answerless questions, and instead to look at what is right in front of me, and then, of course, to laugh.
Thank you, Ayotola. Wishing you much of this joy and enjoyment too. 🙏🏾
You deserve all the joy, and enjoyment. Congratulations ❤️