Cynicism is undigested pain

OK – Confession time:

My entire life I’ve struggled with this nagging sense of enthusiasm, this annoying sense of  unbridled inspiration, this unyielding dread that life should be boundlessly engaging and joyful.

Please understand, I do realize how radically naive this perspective is in a world of ‘level headed’ realists and cynics, but still.  This sense..this joy.. It hasn’t gone away.    It just won’t respond to my efforts to dull it. And I’ve tried.

In grade shool I tried to dull it by being tough — lifting weights, punching the bully and shooting birds with my pellet gun. But it didn’t work.  The weights just made me stocky, humiliating the bully felt awful, and killing that bird tore my 4th grade heart out, but the joy just didn’t go away. There it was. Waiting.

In high school and college I tried to dull it by academic ambition and local Florida rock star ego inflation — late night study sessions inter-spliced with tawdry love triangles and lie tapestries fastened to cover over drunken  backstage indiscretions.  But the hangover would always pass, the games would always end, and there it was…waiting. That joy. That sense of life as unconditionally happy and  infinite.

In  my twenties  I thought I might’ve finally put a nail in its coffin. I left grad school  mid-stream, moved to New York City, fell in love with an evil Russian temptress,  lost my job, drank nightly for years, lost all ambition, ate lots of potato and cheese omelets, read Schopenhauer, and fell in with a group of Brooklyn underground artists so snotty that the slightest inkling of open eyed enthusiasm was regarded like a cloud of torrid flatulence at an English tea ceremony.

But there it was — even then, even there — as our country plummetted into post 9/11 paranoia, at the bottom of my darkest night,  hiding from myself in an intoxicatingly hip web of artistic self-deceit — that  blasted joy!  That damned unquenchable inkling of life as an infinitely beautiful creation for silly people with nothing to  better do.  Nothing serious. Nothing scary.   Just joy — pure, solid and simple.  Why wouldn’t it go away?  Was there something wrong with me?  What was I missing?

And so, eventually, joy won.

I gave up. Gave in.  Surrendered.  I  knew it wasn’t cool or chic or level-headed or ‘responsible’ — but I let that damned river of enthusiasm work right through me.  I let it drag me through the coals of all the creepy fears I’d been buttoning up for decades. I let it show me how unfounded and optional misery and pain are, always. I let it teach me that the meaninglessness of life is what actually makes it so goddamn meaningful.   I let it rip the security blanket of shrewd cynicism from my  approval seeking brain cells, and help me admit that being a wide-eyed intelligent optimist is exactly what the world needs.

And so, here I sit today, in a coffee shop.  A hopelessly happy man of 36, a fellow prone to bouts of joy and passion so intense that my sanity often falls into question.  I’m  loud.  I’m  opinionated.  I’m prone to picking word fights with egg-head academics and overly officious postal workers.

I’m what many people refer to as ‘a pill’… a strong willed, rambunctious  type with a gut level desire to punch the status quo right in the face.

But even in anger I feel joyful.  And even in fear, I feel laughter.  Because I’ve discovered something, a truth so deep and radical that everyone, including even the most militant-minded jihadist, must ultimately bow to its timeless essence:

As humans, Joy is our only calling,  our only inalienable birthright.  Everything else is up for grabs, but Joy isn’t.  As humans we were not made to spend lives in longing. We have chosen exactly that which we feel we need in every moment.  And when we finally admit this we become grateful in ways that no jaded mindplay can destroy.

Joy is our essence, laughter is our real agenda, and cynicism  is only undigested pain.

Why waste another minute pretending otherwise?

Tagged as: cynicism, inspiration, joy