A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
Joy in the Midst of Everything: Singing, Not Shouting
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"If the Angel decides to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Toward the end of the year – stretched thin by overwhelm, geopolitical gravity, and personal fatigue – the word joy can feel like a taunt. Not light. Not gentle. Not spacious. And Mariah Carey everywhere this time of year. Joy: it can feel a bit heavy, maybe impossible, like a sunbeam trying to break through dark storm clouds. And yet. What if that's exactly the shift we're longing for: less like a break in the storm, more like learning to hear what's already humming within it. There's a thread in emotion science that meets this intuition. Psychologist Dacher Keltner describes awe as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world." Awe isn't sunshine-only joy. In Keltner's view, awe is vast curiosity. It's humility meeting mystery. It's an expanded field of perception. it is not oppositional to suffering but rather co-exists with it and within it. This is where the nine frequencies of joy becomes a beautiful tool – one I'm grateful my coach introduced me to at a moment when I could actually absorb it. Rather than framing joy as a single emotional state to achieve, it names it as a range of lived experience — different tones, textures, and intensities that can exist alongside grief, fear, fatigue, and outrage. Joy and suffering aren’t stored in separate rooms; they’re woven through the same fabric of experience. And when we learn to listen for those subtler frequencies, we widen our capacity for living — not because hardship disappears, but because we can hear more of what’s already present. So this is a benediction. Not a demand, not a direction, but a whispered invitation: May you receive the tones of joy that are available to you right now, even if they are soft, shaded, or unexpected. This kind of joy doesn't decorate the wound, but rather hums softly alongside it. This kind of joy is a quiet resonance. It may sound like:
These are not feel-good slogans but frequencies of presence – subtle but real. Keltner's research shows that awe, in particular, helps connect us to wider patterns of life and reduces the narrow self-focus that burnout loves to tighten. Awe is not escapism. It's enlargement – a shifting of the lens that lets us sit with mystery instead of railing against it. So in this season that can feel loud and consuming, let this be the posture: singing, not shouting. Not forcing brightness. Not insisting on happiness. But singing. A vibration of attention that listens rather than blasts. Here is a simple offering you can take into the holidays: A Ritual of Listening (5 minutes)Settle somewhere comfortable and familiar. Let your nervous system answer in its own language — not performance, not expectation, but sensation, awareness, breath. You might notice relief, tenderness, curiosity, resonance, or even something you have no name for yet. That is joy in its being-ness. And then, as Rilke reminds us: stay beginner-like. This is not a call to praise the hard parts of this year. It is a permission to acknowledge that soft joy doesn’t have to deny hard reality. It can co-exist with it — like different notes in the same chord. May your end of year be a field of listening. And may those frequencies draw you into connection — with yourself, with others, with what is larger than you — not by tearing down the storm, but by letting the song expand the room in which you sit. Happy holidays to you, Griff P.S. If you listen for a few minutes and a quiet frequency of joy makes itself known, I’d love to hear what arrived. |
The Pocket
A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
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