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Seized by Joy: Latching Onto Our Moments of Awe and Wonder

A little bit of perspective is all it takes to live a life of joy.
Seized by Joy: Latching Onto Our Moments of Awe and Wonder
First edition frontispiece and title page of "A Christmas Carol," 1843, illustrated by John Leech. Public Domain
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In a 1965 Reader’s Digest article, “Overtaken by Joy,” Ardis Whitman recounts sitting on a train beside an elderly gentleman who was staring out the window at the passing landscape. Both commented on its beauty, and then he called Whitman’s attention to a hay wagon they were passing, “as if there could be no greater event in all the world.” When Whitman gave him a puzzled look, the man said: “You think it’s strange that just a hay wagon means so much. But you see, last week the doctor told me that I have only three months to live. Ever since, everything has looked so beautiful, so important to me. You can’t imagine how beautiful! I feel as if I had been asleep and had only just waked up!”

At the end of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” when Ebenezer Scrooge awakes from his final nightmare and realizes he still has the time and means to redeem himself, we see the full-blown ecstasy of such a moment. “‘I don’t know what to do!’ cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. … ‘I am light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man!’”
Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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