Glad: An Emotion that Metastasizes
Last week found Dave and I marking our 25th wedding anniversary.
To celebrate, we fulfilled a tiny bit of Dave’s outdoor dreams with some backpack camping (with accessible showers and bathrooms 1000 ft away for me) at Sleeping Bear Dunes, we ate and drank through the gorgeous tasting menu at A Cook’s House in Traverse City, and we remembered our inner 24-year-olds with a bike and kayak tour among the breweries of Northern Michigan. We remembered our years and our dreams and discussed the rapidfire changes coming toward us in this shared life.
Beyond the pre-requeset feeling of old with any milestone of maturation, the events of this milestone collected like kindling in my soul and spread out into my being. The place we had come to, these years we had both conquered and delighted in, made me glad.
Glad
/ɡlad/
From Latin and Norse origins meaning bright, smooth, shining, joyous; related to the experience of pleasure and delight, often impacting the mood towards cheerful or brighter in overall tone
Gladness rests within our facial muscles, within our very center, and spreads out.The metastasizing of glad infiltrates emotion and helps us filter our emotions. It takes up space, but in the best ways. It crawls into crevices within us needing a sense of refreshment and offers a hammock. Glad spreads across our faces like a wide smile, and often brings on the somatic experience of that very state. Glad spreads across our chest, lightening the load by shining light, or brightening all the other emotions, thoughts, and states within us. Glad, unlike happy, is not bound to only a moment. This is good news for all of us who would like a little more bright space in our world or lives.
Glad doesn’t have the intensity of happy, rather it is wider. I wonder if in our search for happy, most of us wouldn’t rather have glad, something a little more lasting. Particularly in these annoyingly unprecedented-precedented times, we’d like the calm relative of happy who sticks around and brings a meal to share.
Gladness, according to emotions research, is strongly adjacent to gratitude, in a way we have not yet nailed down. They show up together like family at a birthday party. Are they cousins or twins? We’re not sure of the proximity. My perception would be that one of the reasons that glad lasts a bit longer than happy is because of an expansion of awareness that comes with glad - I can see something in front of me or around me, or I recall something within my proximity physically, relationally, emotionally (even a memory), that perhaps brings a sense of gratitude or - at the least - pleasure. Glad comes with a tiny snippet of appreciation for someone, something, for life itself.
Psalm 92 expresses the connection between glad and gratitude in a very forward fashion:
It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
and your faithfulness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp,
to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
at the works of your hands I sing for joy. (v.1-4)
Psalm 92 is a song of glad, as much as it is a song of gratitude, and I think that could easily be missed. Is God pleased by our gladness? Is there a return on the gift to God when we are not only muscling through the challenges of life but also bright, smiling, and enjoying nature, each other, music and words and art, and life itself?
The Hebrew of “you have made me glad” (שִׂמַּחְתַּ֣נִי). directly identifies the brightness within the emotion of glad. God, God’s love, Jesus, redemption – all these things, while complicated, brighten our lives. When we have trouble, we can pan out and see a God holding us in His arms. When we struggle with the thing in front of or around us, we can pan out to the width, spread out to see God holding all things together even in their chaos and mess, and there we find glad.
Glad is a spreading emotion and we might find glad in the spreading.
Stretch your arms out with me today, lift your face to the sun, sing a song, see the wider universe and you may find a little spot of glad. I can’t promise it. Emotions aren’t guaranteed. They are wily little minxes. Maybe they are so interconnected with our spirituality because they are somewhat, or mostly, out of our control. We can work on cultivating them to co-reside, however. With the anger and anxiety so prevalent in the world, the brightness of the emotion of glad, metastasizing, spreading brightness and smoothing the paths within and without us a bit more, sounds like a good place to be.
Try one of the following exercises:
Name three things that make you glad, and on a sticky note or paper for each, note any particulars about that thing that brighten your world or life; note the things adjacent to that thing and fill the paper with details of that gladness to increase your awareness and a fuller spread of your gladness
Take a week, and capture any sense of glad you find over the course of the week, ideally in your phone notes, something you carry with you each day and have readily available; a tiny Notebook for Gladness might be a good substitute.
Go through the photos on your phone or physical media for 10 minutes. Find moments and relationships of gladness and consider how you might bring that gladness into the day before you.
Write a psalm of gladness - add your words after the beginning of the Psalmists of Psalm 92,
It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare _____________
Raindrops, not on roses, but on our tent in the cool hours of the morning
Whiskers of my labradoodle
Conversation around my dining room table with all of my children present, until they aren’t
The love of Dave, of my dad, of God, of the soul within me
These are a few of my favorite things…they make me glad.
