The Necessity of Shared Joy
How we find compassion by recognizing pleasure
“Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.”
At around six months, babies' early giggles typically begin to develop into an incredible, contagious, resonant belly laugh that almost seems to have a melody. It is an eruption of pure pleasure that overtakes their body and lights up their eyes. Often, it seems to come out of nowhere, as if the sheer joy of the sensation is enough to bring it forth. This laughter is also a powerful solicitation of connection, maybe even more so than a cry. We can’t help but be drawn into the thrill of their glee. I still sometimes return to an old video of my son giggling when he was this age for the wash of dopamine it offers.
I’ve spent a lot of time as a teacher and a parent observing the emergence of empathy in young children. It has always been tempting to focus on moments of strife or sadness in order to understand the development of compassion. When we think about empathy, we usually imagine suffering—the feeling of joining someone else in their heartbreak.
Children are capable of this kind of connection far earlier than they are often given credit for, but even in these earliest stages, science typically measures empathy through a lens of suffering. We document the path from an infant’s contagious crying to a toddler’s comforting gestures, tracking the development of empathy by following their tears.
But what if, in attending only to suffering, we are missing an important opportunity to nurture the ability to connect with and act for others through pleasure. Isn’t the shared joy of giggling together, or racing across the grass hand in hand, or reveling in the mutual exhilaration of watching a friend place a final block on an impossibly tall tower also empathy? Don’t we feel shared joy at least as powerfully as we feel each other’s sorrow, and might these moments, in addition to making us happier, also make us more compassionate?
In the classroom, as I broadened my view of empathy to include, not only moments of hurt, but also these moments of shared pleasure, I began to notice how intently children would work to preserve them. The more experience they had of common delight, the more intentionally they avoided causing each other harm and the more they worked to protect one another. Shared pleasure bred a spirit of proactive care, as they shielded their own individual happiness, the happiness of those around them, and of the community as a whole.
The essayist Ross Gay speaks of an intrinsic relationship between joy, suffering, and solidarity. He says,
“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”
There is an elemental quality to the joys Gay speaks of, as with the baby’s giggle. These experiences that connect us so personally are not moments of planned perfection. Rather, they are ignited by a spontaneous recognition of delight. They don’t require our preparation so much as they require our openness to receiving them. These moments are often small and unexpected. They can bubble up in the simplest experiences, just as the baby’s laughter does. But these little shared pleasures accumulate and weave us together.
And in this weaving of small, connected, shared pleasures, might we also find insight into one another’s sorrows and survival, as Gay suggests? Can we learn to care for one another, and help our children to do so, not only by recognizing each other’s pain but also by connecting to one another’s pleasure?
The researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang explains that the neurobiological impact of connecting strongly with another person’s emotional experience does in fact trigger, as Gay suggests, a link to our most basic survival functions. She explains that neurologically, “We feel our social relationships so directly and so painfully and so pleasurably, because they literally hook themselves into the biological machinery that keeps us alive.”
If empathy is rooted in a feeling of deep connection, perhaps experiences of spontaneous shared pleasure go hand in hand with recognizing and responding to suffering. Maybe part of why it is easier to care about alleviating the suffering of those we know and feel intimately connected to is because we have these shared reservoirs of joy, which we feel an urgency to protect. So how might we expand these reservoirs to include those who are more removed from our most immediate and personal experience? And how can we cultivate an expansive rather than a contracted and insular sense of connection in our children and in ourselves.
Immordino-Yang reveals another important truth that might help us here. Her research shows that we experience this neurological synchrony, not only when we are in direct contact with another person’s emotional experience, but also through their stories. Our capacity for connection is robust enough in our biological makeup that the mere story of another person’s experience can bind us to them. Through stories, we are able to share one another’s joys and sorrows so deeply that they actually register on our own bodies’ survival mechanisms, as if we are experiencing them ourselves. The “de-atomizing” Gay speaks of, it turns out, is quite literal.
If our minds are so ripe for these powerful connections that, to use another phrase of Gay’s, they “entangle” us with one another, even biologically it seems, why are they often so hard to sustain? Why are we so quick to minimize and marginalize experiences outside our own, particularly when those experiences are truly dire—those that fill our news feeds every day. If we are wired to experience each other’s pain, how can we also be so capable of ignoring it?
Here, too, science suggests that our survival is at play. When suffering grows too horrific or the scale of it grows too vast, the very fact that we are programmed to register it on our own survival mechanisms may lead us to protect ourselves by severing those connections and turning away. We protect ourselves from experiences that our brain perceives as threats to our own survival, even when we are not, in fact, threatened directly.
It is only natural then that we would also feel deeply compelled to protect our children from sharing the unbounded pain of the world. As the poet
says,“Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world.”
We want our children to love the world, so of course we attempt to shield them from its deepest pains whenever we can.
Surely, it is sometimes necessary to step over this instinct if we are to raise children who will work to care for others and repair harm. If we aim to raise compassionate adults, we must allow children to let others’ sorrow in and guide them through witnessing and soothing others’ pain, even when our most protective parental desire is to shield them. But it is also true that fostering compassion doesn’t always have to be painful. Expanding our children’s window—and our own—into others’ joy is also a powerful force for compassion and may even carry a deeper incentive to not only repair harm but prevent it.
When we witness a mother, in a far away country, cradling a hungry infant we feel a strong sense of connection that makes us want to help her. Could witnessing that same mother giggling with her baby, as we do with our own, similarly ignite our capacity for shared joy and our desire to preserve that joy—to protect her and work to prevent her suffering from ever taking place, just as we seek to prevent our own suffering?
There are stories throughout history of joy and connection being injected into the most profound suffering—the 1914 Christmas truce, in which singing and soccer briefly brought opposing soldiers together, for example. Or the secret dances held at night in the Warsaw ghetto, recounted in the diaries of Chaim Kaplan and described by historian George Eisen as, “a tangible expression of the community’s spiritual resistance.” Or the children of Gaza flying hundreds of colorful kites in 2009 to break a Guinness world record, in the midst of war and violence. We affirm joy as “a practice of survival,” even in the harshest conditions.
So perhaps we don’t have to choose between robbing our children of joy and raising them to recognize and respond to suffering. As we encourage our children to see the world as it is and extend their compassion as far and as wide as possible, we might find that we actually expand rather than contract their capacity for delight and happiness, too.
As the children’s book author and illustrator, Christopher Myers says,
“I want to give my readers spaceships, clowns, and unicorns, to depict whole human beings, to allow the children in my books to have the childhoods they ought to have, where surely there are lessons and context and history, but there is also fantasy and giggling and play. To encourage them to open their hearts when they see someone who looks like me, even if that person is in the mirror.”
We cannot raise the compassionate children we desperately need to heal our very broken world by sheltering them entirely from the suffering of others. We can only repair fractures we can see, after all. We also deprive our children of the opportunity to lead whole and meaningful lives if we attempt to banish pain, which is an unavoidable component of a connected life, filled with deep, authentic relationships.
However, it may be through experiences of recognizing and sharing others’ joy that our children learn to work, not only to repair hurt, but to stem the tides of harm—to create a future that is less fragile, where less repair is needed, and where there is more opportunity for laughter and dancing.
Wishing you unexpected joy,
Alicia
P.S. If you need a jumpstart on finding a spark of shared joy, listen to these kids.
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What an important connection to empathy. Without connection and joy, there is no reason for repair.