Joy to the world

Of the things that occurred to me during this trip, the importance of finding joy in what you do has been frequently reinforced. I'm fortunate, because I genuinely love teaching and get great joy out of that. And I feel that joy often enough that I'm cognizant of when someone seems joyless.

I hate to see joyless, first of all because I like seeing people happy, but on a larger level it's because what's the point of anything anyway? We don't know why we're here, how we're here, or what's going to happen five minutes from now. Especially if my semi advanced age, I could wake up tomorrow dead. This doesn't tremendously upset me, and I wouldn't put it in my blog if it did. It's just a fact. Life is finite, everybody dies. So if everybody dies, and we don't know if there's any point to any of it, why not try to extract the maximum pleasure you can out of whatever it is you doing?

I don't know if birds experience something like joy from flight and I don't know if other animals experience joy either. It certainly seems like a happy dog is enjoying itself, and cats seem to be enjoying themselves when they're killing something for acting ridiculous. But I don't know. It may be correct to say that life is an unpleasant interlude in up for eternity, but I don't know that for sure and what the hell? I've got to be here, so why not have fun? So yeah, I'm the one over there grinning like an idiot. And I have no embarrassment about it whatsoever.