Tis the season for sugar cookies, twinkly holiday lights and that annual viewing of the amazingly saccharine film “Love Actually.” Little pleasures I would most certainly be reveling in if I were stateside this time of year. But because I am not, I find myself humming little ditties like “Joy to the World” to the baby in my house and doing my best to convince myself that I don’t need that peppermint latte to feel fulfilled. Which is a lie. No amount of fried tofu can ever come close to a delicious holiday beverage. I was griping about the lack of such wintry customs to a friend a few weeks ago on Skype when she asked me if, in spite of it all, I was happy. Such a simple question gave me pause, and as it is the season to cherish life’s happiness, and to wish even more “joy to the world” I can say with absolute certainty that while I am happy in Indonesia, it is a happiness hard won. I’m basically Emma Thompson’s “Love Actually” character if the sequel were to take place in a humid Indonesian village. Like her character I’ve been listening to an inordinate amount of Joni Mitchell lately too.
For the purposes of this post it might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road–you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you were to ask me if I considered my Peace Corps experience to be a pleasure or a joy, I would answer the latter. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life right now, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves to be such a difficult emotion to manage.
Perhaps the first thing I should say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in adolescence, when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but because small things go a long way. This has proven to be helpful as a lone volunteer. A squishy mango from one of the fruit venders on my road has the genuine power to turn my day around. All day long I can look forward to a glass of es degan (my favorite Indonesian drink: shreds of coconut meat in fresh coconut water). The persistent microstresses that fill the rest of my life are calmed for as long as I have a delicious flavor on my tongue. And though it’s true that when the glass is empty the microstresses return, we volunteers do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure here as to turn up our nose at the ones that are so readily available. A juicy mango. Even the burden of the relentless Indonesian heat can be lifted for the eight minutes it takes to eat a mango.
My other source of daily pleasure is–but I wish I had a better way of putting it–staring into space. A cool breeze, the crowing of our roosters and that delicate tropical sunlight that arrives only at the very beginning and very end of each day here. I can sit on my back patio sans book, music or company and enjoy the nothingness of it all for hours.
I think it’s important to note that I am enjoying my Peace Corps service, but not necessarily finding pleasure in it. Occasionally Peace Corps is a pleasure, though it mostly is a joy, which means in fact it gives me not much pleasure at all but more that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily here. I’d imagine parents feel the same way about their young children.
Living with daily joy–this is a new problem. Prior to embarking on my service I had known joy only four or five times in my life, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and deform everything else. Let’s call it five. Twice I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Once I was in water, once in the back middle seat of a crowded car, once sitting on a high mountaintop, once on a rollercoaster, and once in a tent.
It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of emotional data. What all of my pre-Peace Corps joys do include however is the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling–once one is “in” joy–that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. An ice cream cone is a pleasure. Winter vacation is a pleasure. But here in Indonesia as a Peace Corps volunteer I AM joy.
At the neural level, I’m sure explanations can be given in very clear terms as to why the moment after giving a speech to a hundred Islamic middle schoolers can feel ecstatic, or swimming in the Indian ocean with somebody dear to me. Perhaps the same synapses that drugs falsely twang are twanged authentically by sea water, and sweaty pre-speech palms. We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romances–especially if they are fraught with danger–do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. I used to have a wild, dangerous crush on Indonesia. My first few months in this country I couldn’t take enough of it in: the colors, the smells, the cadence of speech. Even laughter sounds different here. I remember climbing a high, steep hill in PST with a few of my fellow trainees simply because we could. We climbed so high and for so long that we did not consider how we would get down. When it came time to descend we weighed our options: a bruised ass or a long evening inching down as mosquitos swarmed. In the end we decided on a strategy that applied both, and eventually my prosaic infatuation with this country fizzled out. But what a wonderful thing, to stand on a hill with good people, dizzy with joy, thinking nothing of bruised asses.
I’d say my real love for this country came months later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and I think the road will be longer yet at times. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day this love arrived I had already had a grumpy morning with canceled classes and was biking to what I was sure would be a pointless meeting while people on motorbikes hassled me with cries of “hey Mister.” But then it snuck up behind me and intermingled itself with the sweat on my skin. I was heading toward the intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.
The thing no one ever told me about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live? Joy is such a human madness. The fantastic writer Julian Barnes once wrote, “it hurts just as much as it is worth.” For months after reading that book these words stuck with me, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Why would anyone agree to eight hundred days of pure, painful, beautiful, ever present joy? I don’t know, but for what it is worth, one third of my way through this twenty-seven month commitment I am so happy that I did.
rootsandfernweh 