This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
The DWD goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
OK, I’m being facetious.
What else is new?
But really, the more I study my own heart, and the better I come to understand various disparate wisdom traditions, the more it seems to me that there really are only two overarching emotions.
Joy and fear.
This will probably become a longer length essay at some point in the near future, so for now I’ll just fire off some loosely organized thoughts and call it a day.
I’ve already written in the past about how anger is basically just a mask for fear. And this makes sense, because what is anger but violent emotional resistance to something we feel is unacceptable? When all our anger is for nothing, and the unacceptable thing persists unacceptably, the mask falls away to reveal the fear.
And then we can think about why we sometimes love sad movies, and why it feels good to cry tears of grief.
We must of course make a clear distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness is shorthand for a whole group of feelings that generally have something to do with pleasure, or, in other words, feeling “good.”
It would be fair to say that feeling happy, for whatever reason, is a kind of joy, but it would be a terrible abuse of the word joy to say that’s all it is.
There’s also deep inner peace, and catharsis, and affection. There’s such a thing as the joy of loving someone even when the love hurts very badly, for any number of reasons.
Joy, in all its types and flavors, is what we get when our hearts are fully open to the experiences of life, even when those experiences are painful.
Fear, on the other hand, is what we feel when we resist life, and the experiences it offers. No matter the particular shape it takes — anger, envy, smugness, offense — fear is the fruit of a closed heart.
In each moment, in every circumstance, we have a choice. Do we keep our hearts shut tight against all peril and pain, or do we open up wide, and let our complex, multi-hued lives fill us with joy?
There are only two emotions