joy comes first

Do you remember the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants?

As a child, I watched this story over and over shuddering at the foolishness of the Grasshopper. My 5-year old self promised to never be like him. I would always be a hard worker. Otherwise, the risk was clear: starvation, exile and death. That wouldn’t be my reality.

As I’ve looked back on this memory I’ve wondered, is this where I first learned the importance of hard work? Is this where I learned to distance myself from my joy?

If we are to believe what is depicted in the fable, our joy is a frivolity. It is an experience with no particular value, and a triviality we earn through the honesty of our labor.

Like a dense piece of chocolate cake, we deserve our joy only after we dutifully eat our peas. When we are shaped by this messaging, overtime our ability to recognize and engage with what gives us pleasure recedes. We forget what satisfies us. Any moments of enjoyment are experienced as deviations from what we really should be doing.

The Grasshopper and the Ant set up a conditional relationship between hard work and joy. We are to believe we must “earn” the right to our joy by working for it. Many of us structure or days and lives this way.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if our pleasure is the key to moving our lives, our relationships and our movements forward?

What if rather than shaming the grasshopper, his musical contribution was welcomed as a way to bring more ease into preparing for the winter?

What if we listed all the ways we used to play as a child and then structured our adult-lives so this essence remained at the center? What might we create? How might we feel?

What if our joy -- that which makes us feel alive, and on purpose and connected -- is the ENTIRE reason we're here?