Joy Tolerance

Above is a video of my daughter dancing at a local music festival.  The slow motion really captures the moment.  It's hilarious, but there's more there: complete, unadulterated joy.  Think back to the first time you drank alcohol.  Hopefully you weren't one of those poor unfortunate souls who overdid it and wound up hugging a toilet all night.  For me it was a beer, on a fine fall evening.  My face got warm, my lips were kind of numb, and I caught a pleasant buzz. Now it takes several more beers to achieve that.

As I watch my daughter dance, I can't help but feel a mild knowing sadness, thinking of how soon, it will take more than what it took last Sunday to produce such bliss.  It won't be tomorrow.  She might even have years.  But one day, it will take more to get her dancing.  And even then, will she be able to find the complete release so obviously present in that smile?  A thought creeps into my mind though; what if the "volume of joy" in these simple experiences remains the same?  What if growing up is simply developing a tolerance for joy?  It's not that dancing is less fun, we just become more used to it.

If that's the case, then we are clearly going about some things all wrong.  Perhaps it is adults at work who should be afforded recess, and children in school who should be forced to work through the day.  We don't want to ruin their lives early!  But it's probably more complicated than that.

Is it that every summer day depletes the joy produced by every summer day that follows, or every kiss removes the mystique from those that will come after?--not necessarily, is all I can offer.  I'll stick to the alcohol metaphor.  For some folks, some leads to more and more that is less and less fun.  But hopefully for most, the development of a tolerance doesn't steal all the sensation.  And as we refine our taste, and technique, perhaps alcohol comes to augment many experiences.  We take it in moments of joy, sadness, or thought.

As the luster on individual experiences fades for my daughter, and her tolerance for joy develops, I hope she isn't inclined to blindly pursue more joy for its own sake.  Perhaps in the moments of joy that don't completely consume her, her better tendencies will prevail.  Dancing all night will be less important than dancing all night with friends.  Vacation from her toil will be all the sweeter because of the knowledge that the respite is preparing her to work harder upon her return.

The tolerance we develop for joy is not a foregone tragedy.  It is in our nature.  Allowing that tolerance to continually reduce our sensation of joy is one option.  The better option could be to use our tolerance for joy as an opportunity to refine our sensibilities about it.  When you have your first drink, it's effects will be profound whether you are alone or with friends.  Hopefully, moving forward you find more enjoyment sharing drinks with friends.  When you're five, dancing like a maniac by yourself will probably blow your mind.  Hopefully moving forward, we all find a time when simply taking our partner's hand produces a more refined joy.  At that point, dancing is optional.

Time Heals All Wounds

….or at least makes them interesting in different ways.

As a parent and generally curious person, when I stumble upon a good example to illustrate a point, I hold fast.

This afternoon, and this is all hypothetical pending police and archeological reports, my buddy who may or may not be a civil engineer called me and told me "they" dug up a body wrapped in plastic in a shallow grave on one of his jobs. My thoughts immediately wandered to the coverage I would be reading in the local news. The corpse was reportedly less than eighteen inches below the soil, so I imagined a macabre chuckle at the murderers soon to be exposed laziness. But no! I then, allegedly, received an update call, and it turns out the corpse was not wrapped in plastic, and may, in fact, be a mummy. Aged several hundred years! What was potentially scandalous and salacious became interesting and fascinating, on a more sophisticated level; moving all the same, but in a different way.

And as my daughter has begun Kindergarten and entered the world of potentially hurtful "friends" and circumstances, I've wondered how to tell her that, "this too shall pass," and not sound like a trite asshole. The undeniable truth though is that, while reality never changes, time just makes us see it differently. I am the proud parent of a girl four weeks into Kindergarten and she already has two on-again off-again boyfriends. I need this stuff!

I don't know what we will find out about this deceased individual. Circumstances of the burial point in interesting directions. But I'll remember my sense of things as I shifted from being concerned about some vindictive meth head murderer (yes I jump to conclusions quickly), to pondering an unearthed piece of our collective history. It's all in how you look at something, the perspective. And a lot of what we call perspective just develops with time passed. And while it's true that you can't change time, you can change your perspective.

So when true adolescent disaster strikes, whatever form it takes, I may not be able to change my child's perspective. But, I will have an interesting story to tell, and if she has the where with all to substitute perspective for time, she might be able to see a way to accept an adolescent set-back, in what looked like disaster in the moment.