Joy and Delight in an Uncertain World

 

Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves

to recognize how good things really are.”
                Marianne Williamson

 

Several writings about joy and delight came to me in the past few days. Each offered a different perspective on the unlimited opportunities for joy all around us wherever we are. It became clear that this was meant to be our theme for the week.

 

In "3 Easy Ways to Bring More Gratitude into Your Life," Nick Polizzi suggests that creating a daily gratitude habit will bring more joy, health and abundance into your life. He offers three simple, daily exercises:

1. Each morning, say a simple “thank you” for another new day of life.
2. Choose a meal each day to reflect on a few things that you’re grateful for in that moment.
3. Write down one thing you are grateful for every day for the next ten days
   

Perhaps you will enjoy it so much that it will become a habit.

Nick offers some suggestions to help get you started:

• What you like about yourself, inside and out.
• Can you derive some bit of wisdom from a challenge you are currently facing?
• List your favorite people and what you love about them.
• Perhaps take a moment to focus on the good parts of your job, the work you get to do, the people you get to do it with, and the compensation you receive for it.
• What are the things you love about where you live?
• What is your favorite color? How does it make you feel?
• Have you received any kind words or praise lately?
• What are you good at? Do you have hidden talents?
• What are you looking forward to in life?
  
• Was the sky particularly beautiful today?

How can you be more open to the gifts that life is bringing to you today?

Often, little things can bring as much joy as those that are bigger and more obvious. We simply need to notice them and spend a few moments in appreciation.

 

In "six notes on tenderness," Kerri Rosenstein shares six memories from her life that she remembers as tender moments, inviting us to be aware of the gift that such moments offer us as we go through our daily lives.

Her mother peeling an orange for her and leaving it on her bed while she studied for an exam. Fresh fruit as a gift of love.

A handwritten note on her pillow, telling her that his grandma’s grateful she is in her grandson’s life. A gentle welcome into a family.

As children, she and her brother are in their bathing suits at the pool. When it starts raining, she says, “Dear, God, please, let it stop raining so we can swim.” Her father gently says, “Did you know there’s a farmer somewhere who’s been praying for rain? This is the answer to his prayer.” Wisdom coming in unexpected ways.

Gathering pine cones with her grandmother to build a bonfire for the rest of her grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews. As her grandmother is inside preparing the food, she hears them all laughing together, and she smiles warmly, seeing her descendants joyful, when she had overcame so much in her life to bring them to this moment.

Less than one week after she met her boyfriend, they went to drop off her cousin at the airport. He witnessed a tender moment when she hugged her cousin goodbye with teary eyes. After that, they sat and talked until early morning - almost strangers beginning a long journey together.

Her aunt told her that when her son was born, she’d go to his cradle in the middle of the night and weep, because she’d never loved someone this much in her whole life, and she was not sure how to protect him in a dangerous world. The power of pure love in an uncertain world.

Can you remember tender moments you have had in your life? How do we bring more of those into our lives now?

 

In “The Book of Delights,” Ross Gay writes about the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives, our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Almost every day for a year, he looked for and wrote about moments of delight, and he encourages us to create space in our lives to experience delight.

In a conversation with Krista Tippett, "Tending Joy and Practicing Delight," Ross talks about the experience of writing the book and what he discovered from a year of looking for delight every day.

He sees joy as a calling, precisely in a moment like this. “If you and I know we’re each in the process (of dying), there is something that will happen between us. There’s some kind of tenderness that might be possible.” He talks about the delight of tenderness as ordinary, transformative experiences.

In writing the Delights book, he was asking the question, “What is this joy?” or “How joy?” For him, that is a life question. He came to see that joy is the moments when his alienation – from people and from all that he was dealing with – goes away.

“If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous. And I love that mycelium, forest metaphor, that there’s this thing connecting us. And among the things of that thing connecting us is that we have this common experience — many common experiences, but a really foundational one is that we are not here forever.”

Ross describes it as a joining – a “joy-ning.” “It is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”

In discussing advocacy, he said, “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary.” When we experience delight, he observed, we want to share it with others.

 

What is giving you delight, today? Think of something small or large.

What comes to mind?

This focus may shift your day to one of joy.

 

What are your thoughts? Please leave a comment below.

 

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We’re grateful that you are on this journey with us.

With love from our hearts to yours,

Pat and Larry