Consider the following comments on joy.
Joy is not in things; it is in us.
Richard Wagner
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.
Sigmund Freud
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Emily Dickinson
The happiest people seem to be those who never stopped to ask whether they were happy.
Joy chased is joy lost; it only arrives when we are busy with something else.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Reflect on joy as something that tends to arrive sideways, as a by product of absorption rather than the prize of direct pursuit, and on the paradox that the more anxiously we hunt happiness the more it recedes. You might open with a concrete moment of unguarded delight and notice that you were not trying to be happy when it came. Move between the idea that joy must be earned and the rival sense that the deepest joys are simply given, unbidden and undeserved. A reflective turn could explore how openness to joy is inseparable from exposure to loss, since to love anything is to risk it. Caution: avoid resolving the piece into a neat instruction for being happy, since the essay is stronger if it sits honestly with how elusive and unbidden joy remains.