My husband and I arrived early to the concert hall and had only settled into our thoughtfully selected barstools for about 15 minutes before her laughter sliced the air with its mocking tone. With a nervous system too highly calibrated for such sounds, I remember my shoulders shooting up and my neck pulling downward as if ducking from stray bullets. I looked to my left to assess who was the unfortunate object of her ridicule. As she continued her guffaws, I noticed her scornful stare pointed towards the lighting and sound technicians who were busy setting up.
Before I could fully follow her line of sight, she turned and met my eyes as if she had felt my gaze. With a subtle twitch of her left shoulder and a shift in her eyes, she directed my attention towards her social plaything. Invited into her inside joke, I cast my eyes fully in the direction of the human whose presence had caught her attention. Like a bird pecking, his hands moved across the dials and switches with a kind of precision that you do not see every day. It was both exact and exaggerated. She turned back to see if I had found the same comedic pleasure in his presence. Wanting to both reject her unkindness and untangle myself from it, I quickly diverted my eyes.
I looked back at the man with fascination. Despite his quirks, or maybe it was because of them, I was utterly captivated by the way he occupied his place in the world.
Although Ken and I were attending the same concert, after becoming aware of this man’s presence, I knew we would not be watching the same show. The band’s skillful instrumentation and performance kept Ken bobbing, shuffling and lively conversing with the neighboring fans for a better part of the night. Meanwhile, my eyes rarely found the stage. I sat awestruck with their lighting technician.
The man wore a weathered ball cap, wire glasses and a full grey beard. A bit slight in size, his body was lean from the altar of equipment he obviously spent years moving, setting up and now stood fully focused upon. Before the band filled the stage, this man puttered around with his panel of gauges and controls as if preparing for a once in a lifetime scientific breakthrough. There was both an obsessive and compulsive nature to his relationship with these levers and I couldn’t look away.
However, the real show began when the band members took their place and started filling the venue with their chords and harmonies. His focus shifted forward, and his body dropped into a paradoxical energy of heightened attunement and full surrender. The music seemed to filter into his torso and legs and moved them like undulating water. They were fluid and rhythmic and fully coordinated with the sounds filling the concert hall. But his shoulders, hands and neck moved as if they were jolted by electrical currents. With big and explosive movements that were hard to predict, he lunged towards specific sites on his panel. Each convulsive move sat in contrast to the rest of his body that gyrated or bounced in unison with sound.
I delighted in how segments of his body moved in full rapture, independent of the other parts that deliberately rotated dials and pushed levers. And then out of nowhere his hands would hit a switch and explode up off the panel as if responding to some internal crescendo the band had not yet delivered. After each dramatic arm flailing, I expected to see the stage ignite in a similarly dramatic light bath. It never did. His most pronounced movements delivered the subtlest light shifts and the most remarkable and mysterious appeal to me.
What was at the center of this man’s ecstatic state and how do you get there? It was such an embodied state of joy that I found myself looking at him with warm admiration and complete wonderment. I remember wondering if his wife or grandchildren have ever seen this side of him? And then I wondered why I assumed this kind of joy could only be shared within the anonymity of strangers. I wondered if at his funeral someone would be talking about how unapologetically he occupied his body and found his true purpose with music and lightshows. I wondered if he stumbled upon this passion in retirement or if he had been lucky enough to assemble a career doing exactly what he was born to do.
I think it was the paradox that captured me most. How does a human body become both unnaturally fluid and so precise? How does a person become so responsive to their outside world with so much untamed energy spilling out of them? How does someone who is performing an incredibly behind the scenes role step into such a personal center stage presence? How was it that this man arrived at such a complete sense of belonging in his own life?
Regardless of the answers, he was a beacon in this crowd… and his very own LIGHT SHOW!
I don’t know about you, but I can say I have witnessed maybe three examples of this kind of joyful self-belonging in my lifetime. Their rarity makes them memorable. But what if it is our birthright and highest spiritual aspiration to find this kind of animated relationship with our own life? Would you want that? I know I do.
It has been Pamela Ebstyne King’s life’s work to study and better understand joy. She defines joy as “an enduring, deep delight in what holds the most significance in our lives.” Which means joy is not a fleeting emotion, but rather a state of being. In her work, she has identified three areas of personal growth that lay the foundation for joyful living. “(1) Growing in authenticity and living more into one’s strengths. (2) Growing in depth of relationships and contributing to others. (3) Living more aligned with one’s ethical and spiritual ideals.”
These bullet points are stated so simply, but the work involved in each is no small task. For most of us, it will be a lifetime of personal evolution. And let’s be honest, life moves fast, demands a lot of our time and attention and most of our social interactions simply ask us to “follow the rules” and “get along.” There are not a lot of structures in place that foster this kind of self-belonging.
I know I shared this in the past, but it is worth repeating…YOU.logy chose me. The original idea came to me during one of my morning meditations. The pun instantly captured my imagination, and I said ‘yes’ to its call for action. But in finding Ebstyne King’s studies, I find myself holding my breath and wondering, have I been asked to help people find their way towards joyful living?
At its core, YOU.logy invites us to become students of our internal world and to live more authentically and in alignment with it. (The kind of LIFE we all hope our loved ones highlight within our own eulogies someday.) But it also addresses one of our greatest Achilles heals. Our drive for social acceptance and adherence to group approval often works against us, keeping us blind or entirely dismissive of our unique contributions.
Maybe this is why the original idea emerged with a youthful question, “Why don’t we study each other to find the goodness and share what we appreciate NOW, while they are still alive?” What would happen in this world if we upended the social pattern found at the start of this story and instead of mocking someone’s unique particularities, we inspired them to live from them?
I know, it sounds Pollyanna, right? But if you think about it, most of our developmental trajectories were influenced by some teacher, relative or coach who spotted our natural competencies and supported their growth. These individuals didn’t have a rare gift in observation, they had a rare gift in naming it and encouraging it. But we are ALL capable of spotting greatness… (where do you think envy and ridicule originates from?)
I have to tell you, one of the most consistent questions asked about YOU.logy is “why would anyone do this?” As if there is something about increased self-awareness and appreciation for our fellow humans that runs counter to some primal survival instinct. And until I discovered this explanation of joy, I have not had a cogent response to the inquiry. But now I would say, “Why would you not want to find this capacity for joy and live from it?”
For most of the attendees, the night ended with two encores and a generous expression of adulation for the band. Mine was quieter and involved the slow descent of tears that had sat balanced on my eyelids and blurred my vision for several sustained minutes.
For two and a half hours, I watched another human being live from their highest potential. Here was someone who had found a passion, employed his natural curiosity to learn about it, and had practiced it so often that he could successfully share it. He was so immersed, attuned, and responsive to his sensory experience that every cell seemed to thrum with vitality. His explosive energy and commanding presence reflected an inner experience that could not be contained. The sum of which was the most remarkable expression of connection and purpose. Of the two performances that night, I am sure I attended the greater one.