I don’t know how it’s been 13 days since I have written in this space. We acclimated to the post-holiday, real life schedule again. The semester began. It snowed last weekend, a rarity in Atlanta. And now here we are with a some springtime weather a week later. That is more or less the summary of my past few weeks with the details left out. And it’s always the details that matter anyhow, isn’t it?

There are pieces of my days that I want to write about, but I never sit down to do it lately. And there are pieces of my days that I am not ready to write about yet but know I one day will. I love writing and the clarity it offers me, but I am also finding that when you are writing about something, you’re standing on the outside of that thing looking in. This is something I love to do in retrospect, glance inward at something after it has come and gone and see it with new eyes. But lately I feel like I don’t want to ruin things in their immediacy by putting on my writer eyes to dissect it. Sometimes you just need to let things be. Breathe in and breathe out and whisper gratitude for what it is in that moment and do all the thinking later. I find lately that I might try to write about something, and the words stop short of where I want them to be. They aren’t ready to come yet.

Part of this could be that I have spent so much of the past few years writing about pain, and it feels good to do that – to search and try to find some kind of meaning in it. But when things are good, it feels different somehow. Like I don’t need to search for the meaning by digging through my thoughts word-by-word. With joy, you just have to be still….which is also hard sometimes.

I am (like everyone else these days) a huge Brene Brown fan, and I know she tells us, “Joy is the most vulnerable emotion we experience. And if you cannot tolerate joy, what you do is you start dress rehearsing tragedy.” I do this all the time. When things are good, especially after such a long season of hard, I dress rehearse tragedy in my head. I think of the thousand ways that the other shoe could drop. The million pieces of my life that could go wrong and create a mess to clean up. Joy is a terrifying emotion, especially after you have survived heartbreak in any form and you realize what the other side really feels like. It seems so ridiculous to type that, but it’s true. I don’t know why I can’t just let happiness be what it is without the worry. I am getting perhaps a little better at it, but I’m not there yet.

I do find my joy is deeper now though. The happy is a different kind of happy from what it was before. It can be big things or little things – the swell of a particular song I love on the speakers, the feel of home in the midst of a busy week, a leisurely walk with the kids in the woods. I feel every single second just a little bit deeper than before.

Life in general is more terrifying than it used to be because I know more intimately what pain feels like, and after these past few years, I think I’m almost operating from a sense of struggle as my norm. But now that the dust has settled and it feels like luck and quiet are starting to blow my direction, my joy hums in a deeper spot in my chest as well. It radiates and warms in a way it never did before. I guess that’s what people mean when they say life and age and experience can make you wiser. I feel it all. Good and bad and ugly and beautiful.

It took courage to do what I have done in the past two years. To look pain and heartbreak and difficulty and even death in the face and muster the courage to know that I would walk through it stronger than how I began. But it also takes courage to do what I am doing now. To be happy without asking questions and without anticipating tragedy around the bend. Brown also reminds us, “Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’ Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences — good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as ‘ordinary courage.'”

Courage is a heart word, no doubt. And I already know I have it, but now I get to use it perhaps for a different purpose. To be honest and speak openly about who I am and what I want. To look happiness in the face and know that I am worthy of receiving it with no strings attached. To know that this is my time and my season and my own life to mold any way I choose. To see the wide open space in front of me as opportunity for happiness and fulfillment rather than scary wilderness. Sometimes joy is just that, pure and true.