The world feels heavy right now.
Everything is urgent.
Breaking news. Political division. War. Outrage. Fear about what’s coming next.
Before many of us have even gotten out of bed in the morning, we’ve already been reminded of everything that’s wrong with the world.
And somewhere along the way, I think we’ve absorbed a dangerous idea:
If I truly care, I should be worried.
If other people are suffering, I should suffer with them.
If the world is hurting, feeling joyful somehow means I’m not paying attention.
But lately, I’ve been questioning that assumption.
What if our fear isn’t helping?
What if carrying the pain of the entire world isn’t actually compassion?
And what if one of the most powerful things we can bring into a frightened world isn’t more fear at all?
What if it’s joy?
Not happiness.
Not entertainment.
Not pretending everything is okay.
I’m talking about something deeper.
A grounded joy that exists regardless of what the world is doing around you.
And I have come to believe that kind of joy is a superpower.
Joy Is Different From Happiness
When I talk about joy, I’m not talking about walking around smiling while terrible things happen.
That’s avoidance.
I’m not talking about forcing positivity.
That’s performance.
And I’m certainly not suggesting we ignore suffering.
I’m talking about the moments when you become completely present and something inside you simply opens.
Think about watching a child laugh.
Really laugh.
The kind of laughter that comes from nowhere because they’re fascinated by their own hand or a strange noise or something completely ordinary that adults stopped noticing decades ago.
Watch what happens to your body.
Your breathing changes.
Your shoulders relax.
Your attention comes into the present moment.
For just a few seconds, you’re not thinking about yesterday.
You’re not worrying about tomorrow.
You’re here.
That’s the kind of joy I’m talking about.
I’ve experienced it while traveling and simply watching people.
A couple in love.
A mother interacting with her child.
Someone playing with their dog.
Birds singing above me.
Tiny moments that have absolutely nothing to do with me, yet somehow affect me.
Their joy becomes something I can feel.
That’s what started me thinking about the imprint our emotional states leave on the world around us.
Catherine O’Hara and the Imprint We Leave Behind
One of the experiences that helped me understand this came from an unexpected place.
Catherine O’Hara.
After she passed, I found myself going back and watching her movies and performances, including things I had never seen before.
And I started noticing something.
It didn’t really matter whether I loved the movie.
It didn’t matter what character she was playing.
There was something about her.
She seemed genuinely present.
There was a joy in what she was doing that came through the performance.
And somehow, watching her made me feel better.
Calmer.
More present.
More willing to laugh without cynicism or sarcasm.
She didn’t know me.
She had no idea I would ever watch those performances.
Yet she left something behind that could still change how I felt.
That’s an extraordinary legacy when you think about it.
She left little imprints of joy.
And years later, another human being could encounter them and feel something shift.
That realization made me ask:
What are the rest of us leaving behind?
Not after we die.
Today.
In the rooms we enter.
In our families.
At work.
In the grocery store.
In traffic.
What do people feel after being around us?
Every Room Has an Emotional Climate
You’ve probably experienced this without having language for it.
You walk into a room and immediately know something is off.
Nobody has said anything.
You don’t know what happened.
But the room feels heavy.
Maybe there’s anxiety.
Tension.
Defensiveness.
Anger.
Everyone seems slightly closed off.
And then there are other environments where you walk in and immediately relax.
People are warm.
Curious.
Playful.
You feel like you can breathe.
We are constantly responding to the emotional states of the people around us.
And that means something important:
You aren’t simply reading the emotional climate of the room. You’re contributing to it.
Think about an airplane.
People are tired.
They’re cramped.
They’re frustrated.
Maybe the flight was delayed.
The seats are uncomfortable.
Someone’s bag doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment.
Nobody wants to be there.
Then somewhere nearby, a baby starts giggling.
Not crying.
Laughing.
Really laughing.
And suddenly people smile.
Heads turn.
Someone laughs.
For a moment, the emotional temperature changes.
The baby isn’t trying to change anybody.
The baby isn’t performing joy.
The baby is simply experiencing it.
And everyone around them feels the ripple.
That’s the power I’m interested in.
You Don’t Have to Suffer to Prove You Care
This is where joy becomes uncomfortable for some of us.
Because we’ve created an association between suffering and empathy.
If someone else is hurting, I should hurt.
If something terrible happens in the world, I should feel terrible.
If I’m laughing while someone else is suffering, maybe that means I don’t care enough.
I understand that instinct deeply.
I joined the military because I cared about protecting people.
I’ve traveled the world.
I’ve seen poverty.
I’ve seen suffering.
I’ve seen humiliation and cruelty.
There was a time when I believed being strong and serious and stoic was part of showing that I cared.
At some point, I lost something without realizing it.
I lost joy.
And eventually I had to confront a difficult question:
Was my suffering actually helping anyone?
If someone across the world is experiencing unimaginable pain, does my refusal to experience joy relieve their suffering?
It doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean I stop caring.
It doesn’t mean I look away.
It doesn’t mean I refuse to act.
It means I stop confusing empathy with emotional martyrdom.
Your suffering does not relieve the suffering of others.
You can care deeply without surrendering your peace.
You can grieve without making grief your permanent identity.
You can fight for change without allowing fear to consume you.
You can look directly at what’s happening in the world and still experience joy.
Those things are not contradictions.
Fear Feels Powerful
There’s another reason this is difficult.
Fear is loud.
Anger is loud.
Outrage is loud.
They demand attention.
Fear activates us.
Something inside us starts screaming:
Danger. Danger. Danger.
Everything lights up.
Our attention narrows.
Our body prepares to respond.
And in a strange way, that intensity can become addictive.
Joy doesn’t usually feel like that.
Joy is softer.
It’s like sitting on a beach.
Or sinking into a warm bath.
Or hearing someone you love laugh in the next room.
It doesn’t demand anything from you.
It doesn’t need to prove itself.
And maybe that’s precisely why we underestimate its strength.
Joy is what strength looks like when it doesn’t need to prove itself.
Being the Eye of the Storm
I’ve spent a lot of time in meditation asking how I’m supposed to move through the world as it is.
Again and again, I return to the same image:
The eye of a storm.
Everything around it is spinning.
Chaos.
Noise.
Fear.
Things being pulled in every direction.
But in the center…
Stillness.
That image has become incredibly important to me.
Because being grounded doesn’t mean the storm disappears.
It means I stop allowing the storm to determine what’s happening inside me.
That’s sovereignty.
And it connects to so much of what we’ve explored throughout this season.
Knowing who you are.
Releasing inherited fear.
Stopping the need to perform.
Learning not to react automatically to every trigger.
Choosing alignment instead of approval.
All of those ideas eventually lead back to the same place:
Is the external world controlling the internal one?
When you know who you are, your center of gravity changes.
You don’t need to be the loudest person in the room.
You don’t need to win every argument.
You don’t need everyone to validate your worth.
You can stand in the storm without becoming the storm.
And from there, you can actually affect the world around you.
The Difference Between Care and Concern
A teacher once gave me a distinction that I’ve never forgotten.
There are two ways we can approach something:
Care or concern.
They can look almost identical from the outside.
But internally, they feel completely different.
Care comes from the heart.
I care about my family.
I care about their happiness.
I care about their future.
Concern comes from fear.
I’m concerned something will happen to them.
I’m concerned something will go wrong.
I’m concerned I’m making the wrong decision.
Both may motivate action.
Both might even lead us to the same outcome.
But the imprint we leave along the way is completely different.
I experienced this recently while working in Hawaii.
I walked into a military environment and immediately began asking myself:
How do I authentically be myself here?
That’s a good question.
But I turned it into concern.
Am I being authentic enough?
Am I falling into old patterns?
Am I afraid of judgment?
Am I less spiritually evolved than I thought?
I became so worried about whether I was being myself that I stopped actually being myself.
I got into my head.
I judged myself.
I made myself smaller.
By the end of those two weeks, I was exhausted.
Headaches.
Body pain.
Emotional fatigue.
And eventually I realized that I had approached the entire experience from the wrong direction.
The question wasn’t:
How do I be me?
The deeper question was:
How do I want to approach this moment—through care or through concern?
What would have happened if I had approached the whole experience playfully?
What if instead of judging every moment, I had felt joy that I had reached a point in my life where I even wanted to bring my authentic self into that environment?
What if authenticity became an experiment instead of a test?
The entire experience would have felt different.
Spiritual Growth Doesn’t Have to Be So Serious
I think those of us doing spiritual work can fall into this trap very easily.
We make growth incredibly serious.
There’s always another wound.
Another pattern.
Another trigger.
Another shadow.
Another thing to heal.
Another part of ourselves that needs improvement.
Eventually, spirituality itself becomes another performance.
We start judging ourselves for not being evolved enough.
For reacting.
For feeling fear.
For slipping into an old pattern.
And somewhere in all that work, we forget to enjoy being alive.
Look at children.
Before we’ve trained so much of their spontaneity out of them, they are wonderfully present.
When they’re sad, they cry.
When they’re happy, they laugh.
They dance for no reason.
They make strange noises.
They become fascinated by things adults walk past without noticing.
There’s wonder there.
There’s play.
There’s joy.
Maybe spiritual maturity isn’t becoming more serious.
Maybe it’s becoming conscious enough to return to some of what we once knew naturally.
Try the Joy Experiment
So I want to give you an experiment.
Don’t pretend to be happy.
Don’t walk into a room smiling when you don’t feel it.
That’s not what this is about.
Instead, think of something that gives you genuine joy.
Your dog waiting at the door.
Your child laughing.
Hummingbirds.
The ocean.
A ridiculous cat video.
A memory.
A person you love.
Whatever it is, bring it completely into your awareness.
Feel it.
Then pay attention to your body.
What happens to your breathing?
What happens to your shoulders?
What happens to the tension in your face?
What happens to your thoughts?
Bookmark that feeling.
Now take it somewhere.
A coffee shop.
Your office.
A cafeteria.
A grocery store.
Traffic.
Sit with that genuine feeling of joy and become curious about what happens.
Do people respond differently?
Does someone smile?
Does conversation soften?
Does anything about the emotional temperature change?
Maybe it does.
Maybe it doesn’t.
That’s actually secondary.
First, notice what happens to you.
Notice what happens when you remember that you have some authority over the state you inhabit.
That’s the superpower.
What Imprint Are You Leaving?
There comes a point in the spiritual journey when it stops being entirely about becoming more conscious.
Eventually, it becomes about what we do with that consciousness.
What happens when we walk through the world?
What do we leave behind?
Fear?
Tension?
Judgment?
Or compassion?
Curiosity?
Wonder?
Playfulness?
Joy?
Maybe the greatest gift we give each other isn’t our advice.
It isn’t our opinions.
It isn’t our certainty.
Maybe it’s our presence.
Maybe it’s the experience another person has when they’re with us.
That for just a moment…
They can breathe.
They don’t have to perform.
They don’t have to defend themselves.
They don’t have to be afraid.
They’re safe.
They’re seen.
They’re here.
And so are we.
Permission to Feel Joy
As we close this season, I don’t want to give you another thing to fix.
I don’t want to give you another wound to analyze.
Another pattern to break.
Another version of yourself you need to become.
I want to give you permission.
Permission to laugh.
Permission to play.
Permission to be ridiculous.
Permission to experience wonder.
Permission to enjoy your life even when the world isn’t perfect.
Permission to put down the emotional martyrdom you’ve been carrying.
You can care about the world without carrying all of its fear.
You can acknowledge suffering without surrendering your joy.
You can stand inside the storm without allowing it to become your internal weather.
And perhaps when enough of us learn to do that, something changes.
Because joy doesn’t stay contained.
It moves.
It leaves an imprint.
One person becomes lighter.
One room becomes softer.
One stranger smiles.
One frightened nervous system receives a quiet message:
You’re safe right now.
Maybe that’s how we begin changing the world.
Not by becoming louder than the fear.
But by becoming so grounded in something deeper that fear no longer gets to decide who we are.
So find the moments.
Notice them.
Feel them.
Share them.
And never apologize for experiencing joy in a world that is hurting.
Because your suffering won’t heal the world.
But your light just might.