Joy Unexpected
Joy often arises in unexpected places. In fact, one of the most consistent characteristics of joy is that it hardly ever comes from being sought, as a end, as a goal--but it often arises quite readily as a byproduct when you pursue other things.
One of the steady sources of joy during my time in Japan has come from my primary means of getting about--my scooter. I blogged a couple of months ago about a memorable roadtrip Travis and I took on our scooters, and that was certainly an occasion that brought great joy. But trips are almost always a source of joy to me. One of the remarkable things about the scooter (that beautiful, styroam-seated, 50-cc engined piece of machinery) is that it injects joy into the utterly day-by-day, the most routine of tasks. There's one road, for instance, down which I travel quite frequently, and everytime I ride my scooter down that twisting, treacherous path I hear the tune to Star Wars in my head and begin to swerve around in my lane, dodging potholes like a Force-wielding Jedi. And I'm not joking about hearing the tune in my head: It reverberates around in my helmet like a symphony, because it's being hummed--by me. And I don't even realize I'm doing it. It's practically involuntary, and I don't remember its ever having started.
Well, while I was returning home from our cell group, tonight's theme turned out to be a song from Les Miserables, "One Day More" (or whatever it's called). The song goes pretty high, as some of you know, and if I'm gonna take it upon myself to be Jean Valjean, I certainly don't want to wimp out, so I basically wound up screaming at the top of my lungs at certain key moments. At a particularly climactic point in the song (with me screaming "One--Day--More!!!"), I passed a guy on the sidewalk, and that old Japanese man spun around to look at me so fast, he nearly lost his footing and fell right on his face. The look on his face the brief moment I saw it was just priceless: Utter bewilderment, horror, and affrontedness all meshed into one contorted, mouth-gaping shape. I laughed my head off! And he nearly made me bite it on the pavement! The laughter was still going at full force when I stopped at the next light, so that the car beside me could see nothing but the arms of a white person convulsing and a shaking, twisting helmet with a face mask fogged over in the cool autumn night's air. And the thought of what I must've looked like made me laugh all the more.
I hope these people are enjoying me half as much as I'm enjoying them.
One of the steady sources of joy during my time in Japan has come from my primary means of getting about--my scooter. I blogged a couple of months ago about a memorable roadtrip Travis and I took on our scooters, and that was certainly an occasion that brought great joy. But trips are almost always a source of joy to me. One of the remarkable things about the scooter (that beautiful, styroam-seated, 50-cc engined piece of machinery) is that it injects joy into the utterly day-by-day, the most routine of tasks. There's one road, for instance, down which I travel quite frequently, and everytime I ride my scooter down that twisting, treacherous path I hear the tune to Star Wars in my head and begin to swerve around in my lane, dodging potholes like a Force-wielding Jedi. And I'm not joking about hearing the tune in my head: It reverberates around in my helmet like a symphony, because it's being hummed--by me. And I don't even realize I'm doing it. It's practically involuntary, and I don't remember its ever having started.
Well, while I was returning home from our cell group, tonight's theme turned out to be a song from Les Miserables, "One Day More" (or whatever it's called). The song goes pretty high, as some of you know, and if I'm gonna take it upon myself to be Jean Valjean, I certainly don't want to wimp out, so I basically wound up screaming at the top of my lungs at certain key moments. At a particularly climactic point in the song (with me screaming "One--Day--More!!!"), I passed a guy on the sidewalk, and that old Japanese man spun around to look at me so fast, he nearly lost his footing and fell right on his face. The look on his face the brief moment I saw it was just priceless: Utter bewilderment, horror, and affrontedness all meshed into one contorted, mouth-gaping shape. I laughed my head off! And he nearly made me bite it on the pavement! The laughter was still going at full force when I stopped at the next light, so that the car beside me could see nothing but the arms of a white person convulsing and a shaking, twisting helmet with a face mask fogged over in the cool autumn night's air. And the thought of what I must've looked like made me laugh all the more.
I hope these people are enjoying me half as much as I'm enjoying them.
posted by Peter Rice at 8:12 AM
2 Comments:
What an appropriate title for this post, Peter-kun! Thanks for the great laugh today! (I'm a fan of belting out "Red and Black," myself) :)
"I hope these people are enjoying me as much as I am enjoying them."
Peter, I am sure any country would appreciate the fact that you hear Star Wars tunes when you ride your scooter. Perhaps you should actully hum it loudly so they know. I always feel as if I am in the Death Star trench run when I drive through a narrow lane of construction...I sometimes even hear Porkins telling me to "stay on target."
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