On Joy

My dear friend,

The candle tonight burns a little differently. Steadier somehow. As if it knows something I do not. I think I know why. Earlier today, I laughed — not the polite laugh of a social situation, not the tired smile of someone trying to keep the mood up in a difficult meeting, but the kind that comes from nowhere and takes over the chest and the shoulders, the kind that makes your eyes water and your breath catch, the kind you cannot explain afterward because it did not come from anything that big.

A child on the street was chasing a pigeon with total, committed seriousness. The pigeon, equally committed, stayed just barely out of reach, wings half-spread, turning slightly as the child turned. Neither of them won. Neither of them noticed me watching. But I stood on the pavement for a full minute, laughing. Not at them. With them, I think. With the absurd beauty of it.

It stayed with me all day. That small, ridiculous, unnecessary thing.

I want to write to you tonight about joy. Not happiness, which is quieter and more patient and often arrives when conditions are right. Joy is different. Joy is unreasonable. It does not wait for the right conditions. It erupts in the middle of difficulty. It chooses moments that do not deserve it. It is almost impolite. Joy arrives at a staff meeting when someone says exactly the wrong thing in exactly the right way. It arrives on a bus in a city you do not know, when the light comes through the window at an angle that makes the whole world look like a painting. It arrives when a song plays that you have not heard in years and suddenly you are twenty again, somewhere safe, with someone you loved.

I have found joy in the strangest places.

I found it in a camp in South Sudan where the children had organized their own football tournament on a dusty field. They had made their own trophy from a water can. They argued about the rules the same way children argue about rules everywhere in the world—loudly and with complete authority. When the winning team scored, the entire camp seemed to tilt with celebration. That was joy. Pure and unearned and overwhelming.

I found it in a kitchen in Copenhagen, cooking at midnight with a friend I had not seen in three years. We burned the first attempt. The second was worse. By the third, we had given up on the recipe and were inventing something that had no name. We ate it standing at the counter. It was the best thing I had tasted in months, not because it was good, but because we were laughing while we ate it.

I found it in a small airport lounge in Entebbe, delayed for six hours, watching a group of strangers slowly become a community. One person had a deck of cards. Another had chocolate. A third had opinions about everything and no intention of keeping them to herself. By hour four, there were stories and arguments and plans that would never happen, and the delayed flight felt like a small gift.

I found it in a hospital corridor in Syria that smelled of antiseptic and stress, when a nurse turned on a small radio and a song came on that every single person in that corridor knew. For thirty seconds, people hummed. Some smiled. One man, carrying something heavy in a paper bag, stopped walking and closed his eyes. Thirty seconds of something good, dropped into the middle of everything difficult.

Joy does not require permission. It does not ask whether you have earned it. It does not check first whether the world is in a good enough state to allow it. It simply arrives, sometimes in the worst places, and makes a claim on you. I have come to think that is its deepest purpose. Joy is not the reward for getting through. Joy is the proof that getting through has not made you hollow.

Because you can survive so much and still have your capacity for joy drained from you. I have seen it. People who have been through enormity and come out the other side technically intact, functioning, even leading—but unable to laugh without checking first if it is appropriate. Unable to enjoy a good meal without thinking of who is hungry. Unable to rest without the guilt of stillness. That is not survival. That is something smaller than it looks.

Joy is the sign that you are still whole.

I used to feel guilty about it. In the field, during the hardest assignments, I sometimes caught myself feeling something light in the middle of everything dark, and I would push it away. It seemed indecent to enjoy anything when people around me were suffering. I learned, slowly and imperfectly, that this is a false trade. My suffering does not help anyone else. My hollowness does not honor their pain. The best version of me—the one who could still be present and useful and human—was the one who allowed the joy in when it came.

This is not about ignoring difficulty. It is about staying permeable to beauty even in difficult places. It is about letting a child’s laugh, a good cup of coffee, a ridiculous coincidence, a friend’s voice on the phone, reach you. Not in spite of the work. As part of it.

The greatest humanitarians I have known were not the most serious ones. They were the most fully alive ones. They carried the heaviness and the lightness both. They cried when it was right to cry and laughed when the universe offered something funny, which, it turns out, it does even in very dark places.

In Nigeria, during a particularly difficult stretch, we were losing ground on every front. Budget cuts, security restrictions, a team stretched far beyond what was reasonable. One afternoon, someone in the office found a very large frog under their desk. What followed was the most undignified fifteen minutes I have ever witnessed among a group of competent professionals. People climbed on chairs. There was a debate about strategy. The frog, for its part, was completely calm. Eventually, someone found a container and carried it outside, and we stood in the compound watching it hop away with great dignity.

We could not stop laughing. We stood there in the afternoon heat, exhausted and underfunded and worried, and we laughed until someone had to sit down. That laugh lasted us for three days. It became a reference point, a shared language for the team. When things got hard again, someone would say simply “the frog,” and the room would shift.

Joy builds culture. Joy builds teams. Joy builds the kind of connection that sustains people through the seasons that have no humor at all.

My friend, I want to tell you something I believe now more than ever. Allowing yourself joy is not selfishness. It is maintenance. It is the practice of staying human. And staying human is the prerequisite for everything else you are trying to do.

So let the pigeon-chasing child make you laugh. Let the song from years ago stop you in your tracks. Let the good meal be just a good meal for one hour, without the weight of everything else. Let the ridiculous situation be exactly as funny as it is. Let yourself be surprised by beauty, unexpectedly, in the places you least expect to find it.

Because the world will always give you reasons to close down. And you must find equal and opposite reasons to stay open.

The candle beside me is still burning. Steady and warm. Tonight it feels like joy itself—small, simple, necessary, and completely unaware of how much light it gives.

Until tomorrow, my friend, let something make you laugh today. Fully. Without apology.

With warmth and a smile,

Ali Al Mokdad