scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.”
Flow is especially wonderful when it is collective flow, something you experience with your team or unit. My former history professor William McNeill experienced that after he was drafted into the army in 1941. In boot camp he was taught to march with the other men in his unit. He began to experience strange sensations while marching: “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.”
The next layer of joy is collective effervescence, celebratory dance. In almost every culture, stretching back through time, joyous moments are celebrated and enhanced with rhythmic dancing. I write this the morning after attending the wedding of one of my friends, an Orthodox Jew. After the ceremony, we men danced around the groom as the music raced. We were tightly packed, circling around him, and he was in the center of the whirl, jumping up and down with wild abandon. Every few minutes he would call different people—his grandfather, a friend, even me—to come to the white-hot center and bounce with joy with him and swing our arms and roar in laughter.
The writer Zadie Smith once described being in a nightclub in London in 1999. She was wandering about, looking for her friends, wondering where her handbag was, when suddenly a song by A Tribe Called Quest came on. At that point, she wrote,
A rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: “You feeling it?” I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me. I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.
In this kind of joy, like all joy, the cage of self-consciousness falls away, and people are fused with those around them. This kind of joy is all present tense; people are captured by and fully alive in the moment.
The third layer of joy is what you might call emotional joy. This is the sudden bursting of love that you see, for example, on the face of a mother when she first lays eyes on her infant. Dorothy Day captured it beautifully: “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms….No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”
This kind of joy is intimate and powerful. I often speak of the time, more than a decade ago now, when I came home from work one summer evening and pulled into the driveway on the side of the house and found my three kids, then twelve, nine, and four, playing with a plastic ball in the backyard. They were kicking it in the air and then racing one another across the grass to catch it. They were giggling and tumbling all over one another and having a deliriously good time. I sat there in the car looking at this tableau of family happiness through the windshield. The summer sun glowed through the trees. My lawn, for some reason, looked perfect. I experienced a sort of liquid joy and overflowing gratitude that seemed to stop time, that made my heart swell. I’m sure all parents have experienced something like this.
Emotional joy can often happen early in a romantic relationship. Fresh lovers glow at each other across a picnic blanket. Or it can happen later. Old couples can feel like they are deeper in each other than they are in themselves. You’ll hear