Do you know joy? Do you have joy in your work as a warrior? Can you identify and react appropriately to instances of joy during the very moments you are working your hardest to fight? Can you share in your opponent’s joys? All of these skills are vitally important. As you have other duties and responsibilities, it is your duty to remain human and sympathetic, and if you cannot experience or express joy, you won’t. You will seem wooden and angry and you’ll get no alliance or sympathy from bystanders.
Joy maps to (in my system), the fourth trigram: Wind.
The list and explanations:
- Laugh
Don’t appear to take your fight too seriously. Laugh about it. Be willing to make fun and have fun. Yes, it sometimes feels like fiddling while Rome burns, but laughter and the ability to laugh about your cause, make jokes at its and your expense not only keeps you grounded in the common reality (where your seriousness and dedication is threatening and funny to some of your observers, some of your opponents) and recognizes the social necessity of laughing to keep threats less threatening. Laughing about it lets you get closer and sometimes make more meaningful change with your opponents. Sometimes it short-circuits the defensiveness your outright aggression breeds. Sometimes laughing works better than shouting. Usually, in fact. - Discovery
Be playful enough to discover new things, again not just about yourself, but about your opponents, and the people watching. Be joyful enough to be open to new ideas, new approaches. Be approachable enough to invite and use new ideas from your opponents, from your observers. Be willing to find new strategies and tactics. Be willing to evaluate them as they come and harness your joy to recognize that outside opinions may be just as valid as your own. This agility is vital to you and your fight. Don’t dismiss it just because an opinion comes from an outside, untrusted source. - Fight
There is simple joy in fighting. Revel in it. Again, the gloominess and brooding shit is not good for you. It’s not good for your cause. It’s the joyful warriors who are the charismatic ones. One of your responsibilities as a warrior is to do more good than harm. Let this joy in fighting be one of your guides to that end. If your joy goes away while you’re fighting, use that as an opportunity to reevaluate your strategy, your direction, your tactics. - Play
Be willing to play. If the fighting isn’t working, the playing might. Stay flexible and sharp, but don’t lose simple pleasure while discharging your duties. - Live
Don’t be so focused on the fight that you forget to enjoy yourself. Take care of yourself. Make sure you’re healthy, sane and well before you put yourself in the battlefield. Make sure you have a place you can relax and have downtime, rest and relaxation and use it regularly. Taking care of yourself is part of the deal that keeps us all healthy and on track. Make sure you are well and well rested as you go about achieving your goals. - Party
Be sure to enjoy yourself and your life in the company of others. Your friends and loved ones ground you and help keep you sane and in this world. That is a vital function. A sane, whole warrior, even a lone (on the battlefield) one, needs a stake to fight for, needs folks for whom e fights. Make sure you not only have that home base, that family, but make sure to see them regularly. If your fight takes you so far away that you cannot party with them, you should strongly evaluate whether it’s worth it. Don’t discard your friends, your family for something as simple and one-dimensional as righteousness. - Love
Another grounding force, don’t mistake it for passion. This love keeps you on the right side of change and keeps you sensible (in the common sense sense), human, accessible. Love yourself (take care of yourself), love your family, love your friends. Express this love in a steady loyalty. The loyalty doesn’t keep you from saying or doing what’s right. It doesn’t keep you from providing criticism, sometimes it’s not even gentle criticism, but the trust you have with folks you are close to is informed by your love and sometimes how far you’ll go is also informed by that love. As holy and as sacred as this giving love is for you, you should strive to love your opponent as much as you can. Love helps check you and balance you if you’re about to go too far. It also contributes to your duty to be merciful. Have a sense of this kind of compassion as you go into battle and it will guide you even when anger has overcome you (or maybe just short of that – who really knows how you work, but you?). - Be content
At every moment in your struggle, harness joy to keep you content. You never know when your energy will end. In actual battle, this can sometimes translate to actual death, but in social struggle it can also translate to your need to take a break from it all, temporarily or permanently. You may be called to a higher purpose or to a different battlefield. Fight every moment as if it were your last. The momentum you create, though you do not wish it to, should be able to survive either on its own or survive stopping on this moment’s instant. This can help short circuit ill-conceived all-or-nothing plans and can also keep us from making short-term sacrifices for longer term goals. If you are content at every instant (not in anticipation of, but in the moment), your strategy should be sound and stable enough for either the long haul or for surviving constant changes. All strategies should be crafted this way, because there is never any guarantee that you will be around to fight them to their conclusions.
Joy in the moment, joy in the eternity. Don’t lose this joy. It is a crucial guidepost to keeping sane, keeping steady, keeping compassionate, staying on target. And it keeps you human. You are emphatically not a killing machine. As angry as you can get, it should never rule you. Joy will help you sort that out. Don’t forsake it.