The Heights and The Depths

Joy and Sadness

Then a woman said, “Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.”  And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked . . .the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

-Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

This is Part 4 of a series that I think will be five or so essays, based on the characters in the movie Inside Out.  To go back to Part 3 or further back, click here.

Last time, I gave you a window into my rich and constant experience of Anger, and how I’ve come to regard it as a transformed power mostly for good in my adult life.  My daughter and I like to laugh when we watch NFL games and someone scores a touchdown.  9 times out of 10 the player that scores does what we like to call “angry joy dance”.  They make a terrible face, spike the football, flex their muscles and generally look like the Hulk.  But they’re happy.  This is another example of what I’m talking about with men and anger.  I can relate.  Football in my teens years was such a joyful release of an overabundance of aggression and anger that needed expression.  I’m so grateful I had this outlet.

Another side note of reflection here: the last couple years I've come to find a lot of meaning in the Enneagram. Here’s one website with some good introductory explanation of this way of typing your character. I am most certainly a Type Four. One of the things about Type 4 is that we don't just feel our emotions, often we think we are our emotions. This is so true about me. I think this is some of my motivation for writing this series, that I have such a rich experience of my emotional life. I always have. Maybe by sharing it with you I can give you a window into my "Inside Out", and some potential insight for you into your own emotional cast of characters!

I promised this time around to spend some more time on Joy and Sadness and their relationships in the movie Inside Out.  I have just recently picked up the famous book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran for the first time in my life, and was amazed to find the quote above.  I find serendipitous things like this in my life quite often, don’t you, when you start to give something your attention and then it shows up everywhere?

Amy Poehler was made to voice the part of Joy and the conversational repartee between her and Phyllis Smith is some of best fun of the movie.  We learn that Joy was the very first emotion to “come online” when Riley was born, but that Sadness came into the picture just moments later, when baby Riley first cries.  (This part doesn't track with my understanding of the emotional life of babies, as I don't believe babies are by any means fully incarnated by being physically born.  This is some Waldorf wisdom that has always made a lot of sense to me.  While physical birth is certainly a threshold event, many aspects of full humanity are actually still "out there" in the spiritual periphery, not yet descended. The entire descent, Rudolf Steiner says, takes 21 or so years!  So I would have put Joy and Sadness still in the “spiritual realms” (not “inside Riley”, but “outside looking in”  if I were depicting the movie . . . whatever that would have looked like!).  As Riley grows, Joy doesn’t really know what to do with Sadness when she shows up, so mostly spends her time trying to keep her distracted and corralled so she can’t ruin the happiness and fun that is so much of being a young child.  Sadness, for her part, manages to seep, creep, and infiltrate into so many places where Joy would rather not have her be, and can’t even explain herself how she got there.  Sadness’s ability to move in where she’s not wanted or expected strikes me as another insight into how this emotion works in our life.  I love it when Joy goes looking for Sadness and finds her trail by all the memories she’s brushed and made blue as she gloomily hunches along. Sadness does have this spreading, enveloping quality, doesn't it? Whereas, Joy as depicted in the movie is bright and concentrated and chipper . . . and rather in denial about the surrounding world that she doesn't want to be aware of. 

The big climax of the movie occurs when Joy and Sadness finally make it back to the central control tower.  But this happens not before Joy herself nearly gets lost in the memory dump.  A desperate final attempt using Riley’s imaginary boyfriend replicated 1000 times standing in a tower gets them back (this is very funny. He just keeps saying "I'd die for Riley!" In a voice filled with pathos).  It’s when Sadness is finally allowed to have complete contact with all of Riley’s core memories (and turn those joyful memories into sad ones, too), that Riley is finally able to express the new complex emotions she is feeling.  At that moment Joy and Sadness realize they can work together, and that Riley as she’s growing up can feel both at the same time.  We see this all the time when we experience those “liminal moments” in our lives, don’t we, where we are as joy-filled as we could possibly be, and also want to cry?  Or we are as sad as we could possibly feel, and yet feel so completely connected to life and beauty in that moment that we can feel the joy of that connection underneath.  I can name so many moments like this in my life.  My father passed away this past summer, and so I can attest to deeply feeling and knowing deep Sadness while at the same time abundant Joy and gratitude.

Just like I did previously with Anger and Sadness, we can ask the same questions, this time about Joy. What happens when Joy doesn’t get the chance to grow up?  When child-like Joy doesn’t get to mature into its powerful adult counterpart, or when Joy tries to always be just happiness, but doesn’t incorporate Sadness or Sorrow?  What could we call that matured Joy & Sadness together?  I suggest it might be called Belonging, and the lack of a matured sense of Belonging is. . . just longing.  This is a theme that I’ve explored for quite a few years.  I’m currently reading a Brené Brown book all about this, called Braving the Wilderness.  I’m finding it a pretty good read, and her conclusions that I’ve read so far make some sense to me about what it takes to attain a sense of true Belonging in a larger world and time where many forces are arrayed against you to prevent that very Belonging. I’d also name Charles Eisenstein and Wendell Berry as masterful writers about this subject.  People who spend their entire lives with unresolved longing, and not enough Belonging, are functionally homeless.  As my friend Peter and I have been writing about in our School is Broken posts, this is a damaging and dangerous state to live in long-term and creates all kinds of problems in the places where we find those people working in our world.  Often, we are those people, if we aren’t in touch with our own longing, if we don’t give it the attention it needs and follow where it takes us. This is why Peter and I named our Instagram page, Reconstructing Belonging, and I still feel this is a powerful project that anyone can undertake and that we all could benefit from.

I’m enjoying the tasks of unwrapping the emotional roster from Inside Out.  I hope you are, too.  As always, I’d love to hear from you.  Next time, we take on Fear, for real this time.

To go on and read the fifth and final piece of this essay series, click here.