This weekend was absolutely gorgeous: the temperature was in the low 80s, a cool breeze would occasionally drift through, and in the evening high tufts of clouds dotted the sunset, lit from underneath and topped with pinks and purples. My husband and I had no real plans other than what seemed important in the moment. I read, took a nap, watched a few Season 1 episodes of The Newsroom (had  to catch up before the new season begins tonight), and then we went to the pool for a couple hours to get our Vitamin D. My husband just made me a mai tai with two maraschino cherries—you haven’t had a real mai tai until he makes one for you, let me tell you—and the chicken is on the barbeque.

Pure joy.

No, I’m not exaggerating. I don’t need to bungee jump or buy a beach house to experience joy. Some people are on a never-ending quest for the next kick-ass moment in life, almost like an addiction that feeds on itself. Our society markets the idea that all of us need to always be up to our eyeballs in bliss. We love our self-help books that offer a life of happiness untainted by “negative” emotions. Happiness seems to be just another product in our consumer-driven culture. Is it any wonder that prescription drug use—particularly with opioids, and anti-anxiety meds—is skyrocketing?

What if certain emotions weren’t negative? What if sadness or—God forbid—boredom was necessary? In fact, what if–caution: heresy on the horizon—we could actually experience more joy if we embraced sadness, frustration, and distemper, uhh, I mean, our temper?

Here’s an excerpt from Elisabeth Lesser’s “The Seeker’s Guide“:

[Quoting Chogram Trungpa:] “Tenderness,” he wrote, “contains an element of sadness. It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived, but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. In order to be a good warrior, one has to feel this sad and tender heart. If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a warrior at all. The warrior is sensitive to every aspect of phenomena—sight, smell, sound, feelings.” Sadness, in this context, is not the opposite of happiness. The opposite of happiness is a closed heart. Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold all of the emotions in a cradle of openness. A happy heart is one that is larger at all times than any one emotion. An open heart feels everything—including anger, grief, and pain—and absorbs it into a bigger and wiser experience of reality. Joseph Campbell calls happiness the “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

A joyful soul often lives in a state of what I call enchanted melancholy. This kind of happiness contains within it many shades of feelings: joy and grief, passion and sobriety, love and longing, innocence and wisdom. It holds the paradoxical nature of existence in a warm and wide embrace. More than anything, it is a sense of wonder.

With a slight shift of perspective, so much of what we take for granted—like not being sick, or not feeling anxious—can become, instead, states of grateful well-being. We can actively choose to regard neutral feelings—like “no headache” or “no worry”—as not neutral, but as full of joy.

This is my kind of joy. It’s lived at a cellular level as far as I’m concerned. And I would love it if our society stopped labeling any emotion as “negative.” Emotions are emotions; they provide information. We don’t need to let them define us.  More importantly, as Brené Brown says in The Gifts of Imperfection, “We cannot selectively numb emotions; when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

What if, instead of labeling our sadness or anger or irritation as “bad” and pushing it underground, we got curious? What if we took a moment to feel into the experience, to be a detective? Where do you feel it in your body? Imagine for a second, what is the texture or color of it? And then, after a bit, does it change? You might begin to see how all emotions shift and change once you take notice. And you just might start living your way into a joy-filled life—the kind  where even a prickly little dried flower makes you absolutely delighted and alive with childlike wonder.