Joy as Resistance
Dear friend,
I’m with Chiara after seeing our friend Jodie. On the way there, we moved seats so we could hear each other. Two young women opposite us were kind of half shouting half talking — excited and animated. Chiara sat down and found a neat stack of pound coins, which I’ve got in my pocket now.
When someone asks for them, we’ll give them.
On the way home we moved again — someone had their phone speakers on full volume. But there’s someone playing their phone on every carriage. Some kids opposite us start up playing a game that chimes and blinks.
“I guess we’ve gone past the point where people feel it’s not okay to blare your phone in public,” I say to Chiara, and we start talking about televisions in homes.
I grew up with the TV always on. It would be turned down when we ate or if visitors came around, but rarely off.
“But why? I mean, that’s not the question,” Chiara replies. “How did it happen?”
I don’t say anything. It was just the way it was. Everyone’s houses had the TV on and the chairs arranged around it, as if it were a fire we warmed ourselves by.
Maybe people are afraid of silence? I know there’s something in me that pushes away from meditation. It’s an effort to sit, or walk, or breathe.
How upside down and back to front that feels.
My eyeballs feel gritty and tired. We drove home through the night yesterday after a trip north, and sleep is tugging at my arm — a warmth spreading through my limbs.
Chiara makes me tea and it tastes heavenly.
At dinner, Jodie spoke about joy as a radical state in a world so full of blatant injustice, cruelty, and deception. Chiara thought maybe it’s because we’re becoming more global in our perception — that things happening over there feel less distant from us now.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
You can’t find a solution to a problem you don’t know you have.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey