Ebullience

e . bul . lience/noun/ enthusiasm,  exuberance, elation, vivacity, zest

It has been quite some time since I read Chenua Achebe’s powerful novel, Things Fall Apart, but the grandeur of what he created in it has lingered with me.  The book has been considered the finest  written about Nigeria at the end of the 19th century. It dramatizes the devastating changes that had occurred in Nigerian culture under British rule.  It’s a story that makes us think of other parts of the  world  where dramatic changes caused cultures to “fall apart,” their centers unable to hold.

The title of Achebe’s book is taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” the first two lines of which are often quoted:  “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Although they were written in 1919 after the end of the First World War, Yeats’ words sound eerily like a commentary on our times when rapid changes in the culture tend to overtake settled norms, making pessimists out of many and causing some to withdraw from or tune out  the life around them.  It’s not unusual to hear an individual say, “I don’t read the papers anymore,” or “I don’t watch the news anymore, The whole thing is too depressing. Too much gloom and doom.” Like Chicken Little, many around us think “the sky is falling.”

In the prevailing atmosphere, when it seems there is  so much to be gloomy about, where does our word for this week fit in?  Ebullience is all about joyful, exuberant living, and someone may say, “There’s nothing to be joyful about today.” But, without seeming like a Pollyanna or a Mary Sunshine, I say we can live with a sense of excitement, anticipation and energy–even zest, as one of the synonyms suggests–if we have the right attitude. If we look for the good around us and greet each new day with gratitude and anticipation, we will find joy; .the gloom won’t weigh us down.

Those who are joyful, appreciate the ordinary; they find pleasure in little things.  “My heart leaps up when I behold/ A rainbow in the sky” wrote William Wordsworth. I had read the poem in English Lit class years ago, but it wasn’t until I witnessed the exquisite beauty of a double rainbow that I realized how the poet must have felt. On a late afternoon after rain, as I came up a ramp onto a main highway here in our city, I saw it–a double rainbow arched across the sky. My heart had nowhere else to go but upward to greet the thrilling sight.  Experiencing something like that chases every trace of gloom from the mind. Poet June Masters Bacher writes that there’s   “something special in the world/ I have seen it in the rainbow.”

My mother at age ninety-five gave me a lesson in finding  joy in simple things. I brought her to live with me after her illness and hospitalization, and she settled in quite well.  She would wake up early enough to sit by the window and watch the garbage truck when it came by. She delighted in seeing the metal arms open up and grab the trash barrels and hoist them high over the truck, dumping the garbage out.  I was amused on days when she was late getting out of bed, and I watched her hurry to the window to make sure she didn’t miss the show.  This was one individual finding joy in the simplest of things.

Today when I went to a department  store to buy get-well cards for friends, the cashier, instead of giving the usual  “Welcome” to the store, sang it, putting the name of the store in it and adding other “lyrics.” Everyone who came in the door got a musical greeting  and smiled. We customers smiled even while we were at the counter checking out,  because the clerk  didn’t let up spreading the joyful spirit. Her ebullience was contagious.

Living joyfully calls for self-care so that we will have a store of energy to go out and “do the day,” to use a phrase by the late  Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. She once said in an interview, “Each day I look for a kernel of excitement. In the morning I say, ‘What is my exciting thing to do today?’ She decided on what would make that day special and then went out to “do the day.” When a person has   an attitude like that, a spirit of gloom doesn’t stand a chance.  Caring for ourselves, we exercise, , eat a healthful diet, and get enough water, air and sunshine to keep our bodies at a peak performance level and our minds  open to joyful living.

To truly counteract the negatives, the feeling of things falling apart in our world, we must allow for transcendence in our lives. This means living beyond this world’s reality only. We participate in the life here with a view to the life to come. This colors everything we do. It makes our personal center hold even when around us, things seem to be falling apart.

It would be a supreme human achievement if all the unlovely, depressing occurrences that make things seem to be falling apart disappeared from the world, but that’s not going to happen. What we need to do, then,  is daily spend time tending  the garden of our own life, and do so with joy.

Blessings,

Judith

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I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).