Humanists find exuberance to be intrinsically worthwhile for its own sake. This is usually identified with happiness. The Greeks called it eudaimonia, or well-being; this meant the actualization of a person’s nature, with pleasure as a by-product, not for the solitary moment, but in a complete life. This entails some moderation of a person’s desires. But I add that, in joyful exuberance, there is high excitement, the intensity of living, throbbing with passion, engaging in daring activities of enterprise and adventure.
Joyful exuberance is enhanced when we not only fulfill our needs and wants, but creatively express our goals and aspirations. It denotes some degree of excellence, nobility, even perfectibility, of a person’s talents and achievements. It comes to fruition for those who find life intensely worth living and at times exhilarating.
More than that, it involves a flowering of one’s personality in that person’s own terms. And in its highest reaches it expresses the fullness and richness of living.
This occurs when a person is able to realize his or her wants and talents, dreams and aspirations, and when a person is able to share the bountiful goods of life with others—children and parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, colleagues and neighbors—within the various communities of humankind. This is most eloquently achieved when there is moral growth and development: a person is able to appreciate the needs of others; there is a genuine willingness to relate to them, to love and be loved, to share and even to make sacrifices for their benefit.
Joyful immediacies are experienced when there is a flowering of life. There are three e-words that describe this state: excellence, eudaimonia, and exuberance.
And there are five c-words that define it: character, cognition, courage, creativity, and caring.
This does not deny or ignore the pain and despair, defeat and failure, evil and tragedy that may befall a person, the unexpected contingencies of fate and fortune that may be encountered: intractable illness, premature death, betrayal, cowardice, dishonesty, or ingratitude.
The mature person has developed a reflective attitude that enables him or her to place these misadventures and setbacks, painful as they may be, in a broader context. He or she can compensate for the shortcomings of life by pointing to the times that he or she has overcome adversity; and he or she still finds life worth living because of poetry and profundity, laughter and delight, romance and love, discovery and ingenuity, enlightenment and success, and the times that he persevered and prevailed. If a person’s career and life is like a work of art, then we need to appreciate its full collage, its contrasts and highlights, tones and shades, colors and forms. Marshaling some stoicism in periods of anxiety, hopefully a person will find that the good that one experiences can outbalance the bad, the positive the negative, and that optimism can master pessimism.
The affirmative person may sum up his or her life and declare that, after all is said and done, it was worth living, that though one may have some regrets for what one could have done but did not, or for what might have been but was not, all told it was good. And, ah, yes! Although there were periods of pain and sorrow, these were balanced by those of pleasure and joy. What an adventure it was—far better to have lived and experienced than not to have lived at all