My friend Genevieve recently asked me what brings me joy – as distinct from pleasure. I was startled at how hard that question was to answer.

Try asking it of yourself. Tough, right?

Or at least it’s harder than it ought to be. I feel like the answer should roll right off your tongue – like if someone asked you what you favorite candy bar was (Mr. Goodbar). But, at least for me, it wasn’t nearly so easy.

What are you working for? Why do you make the sacrifices that you do? Does anything actually bring you joy? Is there something that forces a smile onto your face no matter how determined you are to be miserable or angry? Is it distinct from just taking away pain? Is it a thing? A place? A person? What if it were gone? What if your joy all came from a single point source that denied to you? Is there something else you could turn to?

I struggled with it – and might have given up before finding an answer if it weren’t for the fact that I received her question shortly before arriving in Indianapolis for a performance of Quidam by Cirque du Soleil. The conventional reading of the story is half Cat-in-the-Hat and half Mary Poppins – a Magritte-esque figure arrives at the home a child shares with her soulless parents and he guides her on a journey (perhaps through her own mind – and perhaps through his) rich in clowns, acrobats, and sensual gymnastics, that ends with her coming to appreciate the happiness found in the absurdly beautiful and the beautifully absurd.

But that wasn’t the story I saw.

I saw the story of her Father. At first he literally dreamwalks (at one point suspended thirty feet above the audience) through the performance, imprisoned in his suit and shackled by his newspaper. And yet as the play continues it becomes clear that he is searching – initially to find his daughter who appears to have been taken by a creature of the Unknown and quite possibly of the Unsavory; but then on a vision quest of his own, perhaps within a landscape that he is only able to perceive because he sees it through her eyes. It is a family friendly production, so of course he doesn’t return to his soulless existence – he juggles and balances and embraces a life of smiles and domestic bliss even as his wife loosens her grip on a suspiciously benzodiazepine-like red balloon.

There’s a reason that’s the story I wanted to see. It’s my story – or at least it’s the story of where I look for joy. I suppose it sounds a bit tragic to admit that what brings me joy is Unreality, but it’s true. Life dealt me a pair of shit-tinted glasses and when I look around at the concrete matter of existence I often don’t see a lot of happiness. Or rather, if the concrete remains concrete it often seems pretty joyless. But I’ve always believed we don’t have to live in a world of base matter – if we have the keys, we can unlock (just as the Father did) the Mysterious that beckons from almost everywhere.

For me, for a very long time, the key was a person – someone who provided me with, if not the means, then the motivation to see magic lurking in every shadow. She walked, somewhat colt-like, into my life while I was reading Life of Pi, American Gods, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – all stories that speak of a wondrous sub-reality swimming beneath the veneer of the mundane. And, like any good muse, she prompted me to rewrite the narrative of everything in my life. Then, just as abruptly, she walked out and she seemed to take the magic (and the joy) with her.

But that’s just the self-pity talking (an overabundance of which was a free gift that came along with the shit-tinted glasses). The truth is the Father always knew how to find the sorcery, Quidam didn’t give him the power, just reminded him that he already possessed it. If you spend long enough thinking about a green lamp as a green lamp then that’s all it is . . . but the truth is it never stopped being the pool of emerald incandescence that once illuminated the pen of Kafka as he hastily scrawled a last message to the Subaltern of the Secret Order of the Viperous Tongue revealing the location of the jawbone of St. Bridget the Purifier. It never stopped being the light forever tinted by the words that it allowed Jessica Haig to read one night from the Second Book of Mu; nor was it ever anything other than the sputtering guardian against the Dark that kept the demon hosts of Rusalech at bay until dawn on that fateful seventeenth of September in 1923.

I digress.

It’s a risk of being someone whose joy comes from the endless realms of the whimsical and the impossible. Until you unlock the door to those places (and if you forget how to) the world can seem joyless . . . but once you’re reminded how to visit, how to make every object and every moment magical, there is no place you can’t find reasons to smile and to shiver. There’s a danger there, of course, that you can forget to deal with the practical, that you can get so wrapped up in your fantasies that you neglect the real world. It happens all the time – people let themselves become infatuated, even fall in love, with Edward Cullen or the coffee girl, and scorn the real people who care about them because they inevitably don’t live up to the dream.

I suppose it’s a balance – like everything else in life – between joy and responsibility. One can only get wasted every night (on alcohol or dreams) for so long before one is drinking misery instead of bliss. But what’s the point of walking the earth at all if you don’t ever let your head get lost in the clouds? Sometimes even the most tightly wound of us (perhaps them most of all) need to let the facade of control slip so that the magic can find a way in.