Technicolour Dream Pants or where does joy come from?

Late pregnancy, I am discovering, has me spending lots of time thinking about lots of things.Thinking too much is never a good thing in my experience and yet the mind charges on unrelenting in it's list making and fact finding and guilt inducing task.

This image for example, which I love, has been staring back at me from this post, in draft form, for days now. I really want to share it with you. I don't know why. It just makes me feel... The mind has been looking for a clever way to package it, to attach it to a theme, to make it universal somehow. I've been overthinking it.

During my last pregnancy, what seems like a lifetime ago, and in many ways was, I was in a constant state of what I can only imagine was hormone induced bliss. My external circumstances were certainly far from ideal and sometimes downright scary. Yet I was freakishly relaxed, calm and joyful. This time round could not be more different. I have my beautiful man, our home, domestic bliss, a gorgeous boy so excited to become a big brother. And my moments of joy are few and far between.

What the hell is going on? What is this thing called joy and where does it come from? More importantly, where does it go? 

I have this theory that happiness and joy are different things. Happiness is attached to external circumstances. You feel happiness because of thins thing, or that person etc etc. Joy, on the other hand, is an internal experience.It wells up from within you, often unexpectedly and is not reliant on any external stimuli to engender it. As a result it is often fleeting. It is perhaps the secret to why we are alive - to know joy at all times regardless of the circumstances.

In my last pregnancy I moved much more slowly in the world, I meditated more often, I worked less and I certainly didn't think as much. I was much more present to my interior life than the outside world. The circumstances were rotten but the feeling of joy was abundant.

Suffice to say, this time round I am busy busy busy. I am out in the world in one way or another most of the time. The world I inhabit is wonderful and I am surrounded by love. But the world of my soul, my inside life doesn't get much of a look in.

Aha, I think. Or better yet, aha, I feel.

So here is an image that I want to share with you for no particular earth shattering reason. Other than it makes me feel joy from right down deep in my very big belly.