86. Joy As Something To Be Made And Given

If you look at the etymology of the word "enjoy" you would find that it originated from the Old French "enjoier" which means 'give joy to’. The word was a causative verb. This would make sentences like "I enjoy eating" problematic to understand. How could you give joy to eating? Could the way you eat, the size of your bite, the way you chew, the timing of the swallow, and the pause to savor the taste give joy? Maybe to you but not to the activity of eating. Better still consider the sentence "I enjoy video games". How could one provide joy to software? Playing the game offers joy to the player. That is what it is designed for.

But let's entertain this thought for a little while: What if we are the source of joy? We create it and give it accordingly. And sometimes the joy we create gets reflected back to us. This would mean that the video game is a medium for joy to be transmitted from the makers of the game to us.

This makes me think of Christopher Alexander, the famous architect. He believed that structures and spaces have a degree of life in them. If we saw inanimate objects as living things giving them joy might make more sense. Here are a few quotes from him.

All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.

All matter/space has some degree of “self” in it, and this self, or some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical.

~ Christopher Alexander

Here is his suggestion on how to increase the life in things:

Do one small good thing; then do another small good thing; then do another good thing. Simple as this is, focusing on the creation of one good thing at a time, is already likely to work; it will make the garden better. After a person has grasped that idea, I may then point out that sometimes, the good things that we do work even better if each small good thing also helps to achieve some slightly larger good thing.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

~ Christopher Alexander

The view of joy as something to be made and given changes how we think about our experiences. It suggests that when we want to feel joy we must make it and give it away. It challenges the notion that our circumstance is the determining factor of our quality of life. I don't know if it is true but it may be useful.