Joy is the light that shines in Max’s eyes when he gurgles and smiles as I tickle him, hold him by his ankles and turn him upside down then right side up again. Joy is boundless, timeless, without restriction; it’s like Buzz Lightyear, reaching to infinity and beyond. It’s like a sunbeam, breaking through the clouds. Joy is freedom. Joy is being outside on a spring day when the sky is blue and the trees are budding, their leaves dancing to a light breeze. I close my eyes, lift my face to the sky, feel the cool air against my skin, and fill my lungs as full as I can. My heart swells and I capture the experience of peace, freedom, love, beauty, and contentment, all in that deep breath. For a moment I glimpse the comprehension of the enormity of God’s creation.

Joy is the thankfulness in my heart for the knowledge that my family is alive, safe, and well. Joy is the thankfulness in my heart that I have a family. Joy is the thankfulness in my heart for my family who have love in their lives. Joy is the thankfulness in my heart for my own personal restored hope.

Joy is not something that someone can give me (or take from me). Joy is an expression, or product, of love. Without love, there can be no joy. With love, there may be no joy, because Joy is a choice.

Joy is the light that shines in Max’s eyes because he is pure and innocent and loves without condition.

My personal Joy on a scale of 1 to 10 is 3.14159, mostly because I tend to allow myself to be distracted by the cares of this world. To increase Joy, I should be less selfish and more like Max.

One could categorize LifeExperiences as ThingsThatPlease and ThingsThatAnnoy, then apply an appropriate and meaningful weighting factor to each category. Let the WeightingFactor for ThingsThatPlease be 100, and for ThingsThatAnnoy it shall be 0.01. The MentalAttention given to a particular LifeExperience shall be the LifeExperience*WeightingFactor, thus for ThingsThatPlease, the MentalAttention should be 10,000 times as much as it would be for ThingsThatAnnoy. With one’s mental attention focused more on pleasing things, one might be more inclined toward thankfulness and happiness. With a mind thusly inclined, one might be more likely to choose Joy.