While waiting for the dealership to take the car in for what might—or might not—be a fix, the car simply died. That led to having it towed to the dealership and to hours on the phone with customer care. More than 320,000 vehicles are involved in this recall. I am pretty sure I was not the first frustrated caller that day.
The phone system itself felt like a small parable of modern life. If this, press this button. If that, press that button. Several loops later, I was back at the beginning. When I finally reached a person, I caught myself wondering whether the agent was waiting for me to explode. I imagine she had been absorbing anger all day. I did not want to add to it.
So I tried something different. Gentleness.
I did not see this as a tactic to get what I wanted, nor as moral heroics. It was simply a human response. I felt genuine sympathy for her, dealing with frustrated people hour after hour. I felt sorry for the dealership too, caught between corporate policy and angry customers. For the service department as well, working on problems they did not create and do not yet fully understand.
What surprised me—this is the part I did not expect—was joy.
In showing kindness and awareness, I found myself experiencing joy. I do not mean happiness, and certainly not relief. Nothing had been resolved. The situation was still inconvenient, uncertain, and potentially expensive. Yet there it was. Quiet, steady, and unforced.
C. S. Lewis once wrote about being surprised by joy. He was not talking about cheerfulness or optimism. He was naming an experience that arrives unannounced, independent of circumstances, and refuses to be reduced to causes and effects. Lewis was clear, though, that joy was never the end or the goal. It was a signpost—something that pointed beyond itself, precisely because it could not be held or satisfied.
That insight echoes a much older one. Augustine understood love itself as a form of longing. Not a longing that is finally quenched, but one that deepens as it is lived. Joy, in that sense, is not possession but orientation. It does not resolve desire. It clarifies it. That might make me sound odd, but it comes close to what I felt.
The joy did not come from the outcome. It came from integrity—from staying aligned with who I am when irritation would have been easier. It came from inner balance, and from meeting others with openness rather than resistance. It came, perhaps, from letting go of the need to control what could not be controlled.
I am increasingly convinced that this experience of joy has little to do with how things turn out. It arises from nonattachment, not indifference. From presence, not passivity. From an inner peace that does not flee difficulty but refuses to be defined by it. Inner peace is not escape. It is equanimity. When that balance is there, joy does not have to be sought or manufactured. It simply remains.
Even in a customer-care feedback loop.
Take care and be well.
+Ab. Andy