Joy Without Guilt: Holding Abundance in a Hurting World

Last week, I was sitting on my sister's screened-in porch in Florida, house-sitting while she was away. The morning air was balmy and soft.. I had a cup of really good coffee and I was watching the sunrise paint everything coral and gold.

And I felt it: that sudden, unbidden rush of contentment that makes your chest expand. The kind of pure, simple happiness that arrives without warning.

Then, just as quickly, the contraction. The mental scroll through headlines. The sirens I'd heard the night before. How dare I sit here, cradled in this perfect morning, sipping good coffee on someone else's beautiful porch, when the world is burning?

Maybe you know this feeling too. This peculiar modern guilt that arrives uninvited whenever joy shows up at our door.

The Guilt We Perfect

I used to be really good at this guilt. Professional-level, even. I'd catch myself laughing at something funny my husband said and immediately think about refugee camps and famines. I'd feel the sun on my face during a walk and remember climate change. It was like I'd appointed myself the emotional police, making sure I never enjoyed anything too much, never forgot for too long that suffering exists.

I thought this made me a good person. Aware. Compassionate. Tuned in.

What it actually made me was exhausted.

Here's what took me years to understand: my misery wasn't helping anyone. My guilt about having a stable home wasn't housing anyone. My shame about laughing wasn't feeding anyone. I was just... depleted. And depletion, it turns out, is a terrible starting point for love.

When Joy Feels Like Betrayal

There's this moment I keep coming back to. I was working with a woman who'd lost her husband — sudden accident, the kind that rewrites everything in an instant. We'd been meeting for months, moving through the landscape of her grief together. This particular day, she came in looking different. Lighter, somehow.

"I laughed yesterday," she said, like a confession. "Really laughed. At something stupid on TV. And then I cried because how could I laugh when he's gone?"

We sat with that for a while. The way joy felt like betrayal. The way her body was trying to remember how to be alive, and her mind kept saying no, not yet, not ever.

"What if," I finally asked, "your laughter is how your husband knows you're going to be okay? What if joy is how love keeps moving?"

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said something I'll never forget: "You mean it's not either/or? I can carry both?"

Yes. Oh, yes. We can carry both.

The Sacred Lives in Both

The mystics knew this. They didn't separate the sacred from celebration. Teresa of Ávila, that wild, wonderful Spanish nun, supposedly once said, "From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us!" She danced. She laughed. She also wept for the world. She understood something we've forgotten: that joy and sorrow aren't opposites. They're siblings. They live in the same house of the heart.

When I let joy in now something interesting happens. It doesn't make me care less about suffering. It makes me more useful to it. Joy fills me up. It reminds me what we're trying to protect, what we're working toward, what's possible when love takes root and blooms.

I think about my friend who's a therapist working with abused children. She holds their trauma every single day, stories that would break most of us. And you know what she does? She keeps a candy jar on her desk - the good stuff, full-size bars. She wears ridiculous, colorful socks that make the kids laugh. She painted her office ceiling like a sky with clouds.

"Joy really matters when you're dealing with trauma," she told me once, restocking her candy stash. "Sometimes it's the only thing that reminds these kids - reminds me - that there's something beyond survival. That sweetness still exists."

Defiant Flames

This isn't about toxic positivity. This isn't about looking away from hard truths or painting silver linings on storm clouds. This is about something much more radical: refusing to let despair have the last word.

When we choose joy in a world that's hurting, we're not being naive. We're being defiant. We're saying: I see the darkness, and still, I insist on tending this small flame.

That flame matters. It matters because others are drawn to its warmth. It matters because it lights one small corner of the vast darkness. It matters because it proves that darkness isn't the only truth.

Joy as Resistance

A few months ago, I was at a gathering where someone asked, "How can we celebrate anything when democracy is crumbling and the planet is burning?" The room got quiet. We all felt it — that weight, that question that lives under everything now.

Then a woman in our group who'd lived through things I can barely imagine, spoke up. "The world has always been ending," she said. "And beginning. Both at once. Our job isn't to choose between grieving and celebrating. Our job is to show up for all of it. To keep our hearts soft enough for both."

She paused, then added: "Besides, authoritarians want you to stop celebrating. Joy is resistance, honey."

The Practice

So here's what I practice now, imperfectly but persistently: When joy arrives, I try to receive it like a guest who's traveled a long way to see me. I don't interrogate it at the door. I let it in.

And when guilt follows (it usually does), I try to be gentle with that too. "I see you," I tell it. "I know you're trying to make sure I don't forget. But I can hold joy and still remember. Watch me."

Then I do something with that joy. I let it move through me and out into the world. Sometimes that looks like a donation. Sometimes it's a text to someone who I know is going through a hard time. Sometimes it's just being more patient in traffic because my joy has made me spacious enough to be able to move through things with a little more ease.

Joy isn't selfish when it makes us more generous. And in my experience, real joy - the kind that comes from being present to the profound gift of being alive, always makes us more generous.

What the World Actually Needs

The world needs people who haven't forgotten how to be delighted. Who can still be amazed by moonlight, by the way soup smells when you're hungry, by the absurd determination of weeds growing through concrete. Not because these things matter more than suffering, but because they're proof that beauty persists. Against all odds, it persists.

Your joy doesn't mock anyone's pain. It whispers to pain: This is what's possible. This is what we're walking toward. Don't give up.

So please, when happiness finds you in whatever form, however briefly, don't push it away. The world doesn't need more guilt. It needs more people who remember what wholeness feels like, who can hold both sorrow and celebration in the same breath.

It needs people who can stand in the fire and still notice the stars.

That's not naive. That's the deepest courage I know.