JOYFUL MOMENTS
A column by Julia Maddaus
​Have you ever felt lousy and wished you could find something to make you smile? Hopefully, that is what this column will offer. Joyful Moments is a collection of anecdotes intended to inspire happiness, accompanied by suggestions for where to seek out more joy in life. I will also be publishing reader submissions of brief stories that illustrate joy. Tiny Feel-Good Stories should be 100 words or less, and you can use them to share a moment where you were happy or to honor someone or something in your life that brings you joy. Titles are optional (I’ll write one for you if you don’t have one). Submit your story using the form below!
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Joyful Moments: Hatred and Kindness on Public Transit
Nearly every morning, my mom or dad drives me to the Expo/La Brea station of the E line train, and I get on the one bound for Santa Monica. I get off two stops later at Culver City and walk to school. And nearly every afternoon, I walk back to the Culver City train station and take the train bound for downtown, two stops to Expo/La Brea. Some days, one of my parents will pick me up there. Other days, I will get on the 212 bus and take it to Slauson and Overhill and then walk the rest of the way home.
I’ve been doing that all school year, and my time taking public transit has shown me some of the range of human natures that converge in a space that anyone can be (despite Metro’s futile efforts to make you tap your card). There are people who take a window seat so that someone else can take the one next to them. There are people who take the window seat and plop their bag down in the one next to them so no one can sit there. (There are also people who do this but then move their bag to their lap if they see someone in need of a seat.) There are people who take the aisle seat even though the window seat is empty, so that no one can sit there. There are people who sit in the handicapped/senior seats if they’re open, even though they aren’t handicapped or seniors. There are also the people who don’t. There are people who do, but get up and offer their seat if a senior or handicapped person doesn’t have anywhere to sit. There are people who offer their regular seats to regular people with a lot to carry. There are people who smile and coo at other people’s children.
These experiences, these everyday things, have happened to me many times. A couple more unusual things have happened to my mom, who takes the same train as me, but further, to get to work. Once, a woman on the train platform gave her a bottle of white wine, explaining, first in shaky English and then in Spanish when my mom told her that she speaks it, that she had gotten it for free and didn’t drink alcohol. When I joined my mom on the train at Culver City, she first said hi to me and then turned to the woman who was sitting behind her. “Mi hija,” she explained. I don’t remember what the woman responded - my Spanish isn’t very good - but I remember it was complimentary. What a kindness, this!
I’ve taken the train from Culver City to Downtown LA and back again, but I’ve never witnessed a crime. My mom has. Standing on a platform, she saw a man with a bag call a woman an “Asian b****” and hit her with it.
It’s things like these that make people question the goodness of human nature. If someone can commit what’s evidently a racist hate crime in broad daylight, how good can we really be? And that’s a reasonable thing to wonder.
But also on that platform were a dozen strangers who gathered around the woman to ask if she was alright and offer to call the police. When the train came, a couple of Metro safety officers got on in the woman’s car.
If a world truly free of judgment and hate is impossible, as many believe, perhaps it’s the most reassuring thing that people rallied. If some people are going to be hateful no matter what, all we can hope is that the rest of us will try to do right by those who’ve been hurt. And we will, on the whole. For every crazy racist who will hit a stranger on a train platform, there are countless others who will come over to her afterward and ask if she wants to call the authorities. Maybe some people will do hateful things. But the aftermath of these instances shows us that, at the very least, when it comes right down to it, we care about each other. We want to help each other. And that doesn’t compensate for the fear and stress that woman must have felt, but it shows that outwardly hateful people are in the minority. That counts for something.
Joyful Moments: Experiences Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts
I read an article recently that got me thinking about life, happiness, and what we decide they are. It described a way of finding fulfillment and satisfaction that was about more than doing things that are enjoyable. In fact, it was about doing things that aren’t enjoyable, but manage to fill our lives with joy anyway – perhaps all the more so for it.
If you regularly read this column, you know that I run, both for the cross country and distance track teams and on my own, for fun. If you know these things about me and they lead you to think I’m crazy, you are not the only one. The fact of the matter is that running hurts – as I write this, I’m sitting awkwardly to avoid bothering all the sore muscles from yesterday’s practice – and for most people, when you’re actually doing it, you wish you weren’t. I find that the exercise-induced joy hormones are powerful enough that I actually enjoy the minutiae of running, but plenty of people who run don’t. Why, then, do we persist in doing it? What about it compels us to do something that is, in actuality, painful?
You may not run, but you probably have something else you do that you don’t enjoy. Maybe it’s another sport; maybe it’s writing; maybe it’s an instrument you play; maybe it’s something else entirely. Why do you keep doing it? Your answer is probably one of two: “my parents make me” or “I don’t know.” If you’re in the former category, I can’t help you. But if you’re in the latter category, I might have an answer. You’ve almost certainly heard the truism “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It’s the idea that the result of a combination of things, be they people or efforts or strategies or some other thing, creates something greater – better, more effective, more powerful, et cetera – than the total of what each would create alone.
If you added up how I actually feel during each minute of running, you’d probably come out with a net positive. Well, you’d be more likely to than not anyway. But not by much. And it wouldn’t be much of a net positive. But running overall is definitely a net positive for my life. This contrast becomes especially stark when you factor in my preference for hills. They objectively suck – they are undeniably more unpleasant than running on flat ground – but I prefer running with some, and I choose to run on them when I don’t have to, when I could go just as far in less time on flatter ground or just as long but cover a greater distance. Why? There’s something rewarding about it that’s hard to pin down. I think it goes to human nature. Humans aren’t straightforwardly utilitarian, prioritizing net happiness above all else – or at least, not all the time. There’s a special kind of satisfaction we derive from doing things that are difficult, things that hurt, things that objectively suck. It’s fulfilling in a way that always doing easy things isn’t. I don’t know why it is this way – maybe we like the specialness of doing something other people wouldn’t dare? That seems awfully shallow for such a deep-seated drive – but I’m pretty confident that’s how it is. We dream big, we do bold things, we take risks, when we don’t have to, because we want to and because we can.
Joyful moments - Philosophical thoughts I had whiile running
As a cross country runner, I’ve heard people describe what they think about while running in all sorts of different ways. A friend of mine who runs both cross country and track says that her internal monologue is her worst enemy in running, and she does better in shorter distances because she has less time to think herself into a panic spiral. One teammate said that during her race, she thought about every single movement, pushing each to be as powerful as possible. Another said he thought about all kinds of food he would be able to eat when he was done (he’s not alone in this - at one cross country meet, I saw someone cheering on their teammate with a giant sign which read “THINK ABT THE FOOD” in large, colorful block letters). Once, someone said she spent a whole race translating phrases like “I hate running” and “I don’t want to do this” into the language she was learning.
For my races, I prefer an approach reminiscent of piloting one of those giant humanoid suits you sometimes see in science fiction. The pilot sits up in the head, pulling levers and pushing buttons to make the mechanical body move. I think of my consciousness like the pilot, squirreled away in my head, sending down directions and only minimally aware that they’re being followed. In part, I do this because running hurts, and consolidating my awareness in a part of me that doesn’t hurt is a good way to minimize the pain. But this has other advantages as well, including giving me lots of time to think. Mostly, I think about running, but a lot of my thoughts about running apply to life generally as well.
For example, if you have a race that’s not amazing, you probably think something along the lines of “I’d have done better if _______.” I have certainly done this, and I have filled in the blank with things ranging from “I hadn’t eaten that applesauce which gave me a stomach cramp” to “it wasn’t so gosh darn hot out here” to “that hill wasn’t so freaking steep.” Even the options that blame yourself are a kind of comfort, because all of them blame the outcome on a circumstance that’s relatively rare and probably won’t happen next time. The implicit promise is that next time will be better because it will be free of the circumstance that made this time bad.
The problem with that is that although each circumstance individually is rare, there are so many different ones that negatively affect performance that there almost certainly will be another one next time, even if it’s not the same thing. You might be more likely to not get a side stitch than to get one, but the odds are that if it isn’t that, it’ll be something else. In a race of sixty runners, perhaps three will not experience any complications or obstacles.
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What is the point of knowing all this? Well, what it shows is that your ability to do well in a race is not about your ability to do well in those mythical perfect conditions. Your ability is not determined by those. Your ability will almost certainly be measured by what you can do when you are one of the other fifty-seven runners.
This is true of many things other than running. My middle school music teacher would say that in a performance, you could perform to about 80% of the best you could do in practice. Pressure and bad luck can have that effect.
At this point, you may be asking yourself why all this is in a Joyful Moments column. It’s hardly very joyful. You would be right to wonder that, but this somewhat grim understanding can be helpful; it means that it’s okay if you don’t do as well as you want to or as well as you think you should. The best you can do in one set of circumstances is inevitably going to be different from the best you can do in others. It’s still your best, and it’s still good enough.
You aren’t always going to be happy all the time. Sometimes I think people get the idea that that’s how they’re supposed to be. But 100% of anything is almost never possible in the real world. Life is not going to be easy sometimes. However, it often only takes something small to make you feel at least a little bit better.
Sometimes it can be helpful to zoom out. Think about the universe. The great big infinite universe is always expanding. There are billions upon billions of stars and galaxies and planets and chunks of rock and dense clouds of vapor. Think about the billions of years it took for all of this to form. There are more than 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a single droplet of water. All of this had to be formed, and all of it has moved and existed in space over billions of years. Think about the incredible sequence of coincidences that led to the creation of life on this planet, and all 3,800,000,000 or so years of random mutations that led to the evolution of humanity and the creation of you. What a miracle that is! How lucky we are, to exist!
Joyful moments - First Edition
Tiny Feel- Good Story
Since this is the first issue of Joyful Moments, the first Tiny Feel-Good Story will be written by me. You can submit a Tiny Feel-Good Story here.
Twenty-EIght minutes and Fifty Seconds Flat
When the parental cheer squad left before the last guy on our team came by, I decided to cheer for him, even with sore legs from my own race earlier. It wasn’t fair that the most enthusiastic guy on our team wasn’t celebrated, just because he was the slowest.
Chasing him around the course, I screamed and cheered and shouted. Another teammate joined me. We passed some other runners, complete strangers, and they, too, cheered as he passed. When he finally crossed the finish line, more than seven minutes behind the second to last person, the whole crowd was cheering.
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- Julia Maddaus
Me at the meet before my race!