"Latent joy performs a great office in life. You may have your stock of well-being condensed into ecstasies, trances of good fortune and delight, preceded and followed by blank or painful weeks and months; or, you may have your joy spread over all the days in a bland, vague, uniform sense of power and hope."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: Mormon Tea with Cedar Mesa Sandstone dome in the background, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 27, 2011
In this fascinating passage, Emerson imagines that each of us is given a fixed amount of joy in life. We may choose to have that joy given in ecstatic peak experiences (symbolized by the dark nodes in the Mormon tea) interspersed with long periods where nothing special occurs. Or, we may decide instead in favor of a constant low-level state of joy that occurs all of the time (symbolized by the seamless sandstone dome looming in the background). There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to each state. Early in life, we experience joy mainly in the first way; that is, as a passively-received high that quickly dissipates. Eventually, however, we move to the second way, where we learn to practice and embody joy in a constant manner rather than simply feel it.
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