Written March 15, 2013
This week I chose to bring JOY to the forefront via my Monday blog, Do It With Joy. On Facebook I shared my Sketchbook Project Dream Journal which was an absolute delight to create primarily because I had no expectations or connection to its outcome. Rather I just followed its flow and watched where it took me which is one of many definitions of joy in my book.
I also shared two people who have chosen to live joy-filled lives. Tim Harris simply embodies joy with each hug he offers his customers, and Susan Spencer-Wendel shifted her perspective to allow herself to make joy her focus for a year of her life after a diagnosis of ALS.
I also pinned a whole bunch of great sentiments regarding joy onto my Pinterest board called, Do It With Joy!
So after all of that, you’d think we’d be squared away, right? Nope. Not square in me. I realized that these quips and quotes make it all sound so easy, like it’s this switch that turns on and off or like we’re supposed to mask our other emotions and worries and fears and just be happy all the time. Maybe that’s not how you understood it, but I had this inkling that you might have and I just didn’t feel good about leaving it at that. Because if you think it’s that easy and you try it and it doesn’t work, you give up and go back to worrying and struggling and all of that. You can watch an inspiring video or read some quotes and feel all warm and fuzzy for awhile, but as soon as you go back to work or home or real life and things get a little off center you lose that feeling and it’s the old grind again.
We don’t really talk about the work that needs to be done to allow ourselves the ability to choose joy and to keep that joy no matter what’s going on around us. I say ‘work’ because it is in a way. It’s inner work. I realized during this week of joy talk, I had skipped all that I know about that inner work and offered you only the ending joy piece. I mean, I don’t know everything about it because as Billy Joel sings in his Shades of Gray song, “The more I find out, the less that I know”. But I’m grateful to have learned a few things from some marvelous teachers over the years that have led me to the inner work that then brought me to joy.
And so, in the near future, there will be more blogs about just that – the inner work that leads to where we’ve been this week, JOY. In the meantime, watch and rewatch and read and reread whatever you need to in order to tap into that joyful feeling. Don’t worry how long it sticks, but rather focus on how wonderful it feels. That is a gift in itself to know the feeling of joy.
Stay tuned!
