Living a Life Filled With Joy Is Entirely Your Responsibility
As he gently dragged the fake plastic razor over his rosy cheeks and tiny chin, my five year old son proudly said it was time to shave his face. “Mama, look at all the hairs I have!”, pointing at his bare upper lip and non-existent beard. Though I knew this started as a clever stall tactic to avoid brushing his teeth, his sincerity was genuine.
He continued to carefully shave his neck, telling me that he is in fact, a big boy, and I found myself completely engrossed in the moment. A wide smile lit my face, my heart opened and I felt the beautiful warmth of pure, unadulterated joy.
The simplicity of this moment and the joy that it brought serve as a reminder that it’s in the everyday acts of living that we often find our flow. Before shaving his face, I’d been chasing my son around the top floor of our house, trying to herd him into the bathroom and wrangle him into bed.
It was a typical evening for us, with nothing out of the ordinary. No expectations of magic or joy — just the somewhat exasperated sighs of a mother hoping for cooperation as she looked forward to her opportunity to collapse on the couch.
His actions were worth savoring and are likely never to be repeated, but I could have just as easily pushed this fact aside and marched him off to bed. Instead I chose joy. I chose to take an extra 10 seconds to focus on the gift of my son’s innocence and his understanding of the world.
My joy came from a profound sense of gratitude that I’m mother to this tiny little human. Though it might sound like a cheesy, made for TV moment, the entire exchange was a poignant reminder of where joy really comes from — inside of us — and that it is an active choice.
We often equate joy with happiness and assume they are the same thing or closely related. It’s an easy mistake to make because these two feelings seem to come from a similar place but the distinction between them is an important one.
While joy is reliant on our internal circumstances and is an active choice, happiness is dictated by external factors. We pursue happiness at all costs and think that, “I’ll be happy when I finish college”, or “Things will finally be great when I get that big promotion”. These are false dichotomies.
Hedging our happiness on things external to us is a recipe for let down. It means that we’re always relying on specific, preconceived notions of what happiness looks like in order to feel like we can be happy. And that happiness is fleeting once the initial glow of our new car fades and we realize the grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s so pervasive that I’ve even caught myself thinking in the middle of a beautiful moment that, “I’d probably enjoy this more and be happier if I could just lose five pounds.”
Things are further complicated because we’re told that being happy should be our ultimate goal. This mantra follows us everywhere, and most of the time it manifests itself as someone trying to convince us that whatever they have to sell us is the key to fulfillment. Whether it’s a new pair of shoes, a self-help scheme or trip to Bali, the prevailing notion is that our current situation has to be changed, and happiness will follow.
As a counter to this consumer driven quest for happiness, minimalism has caught on and the movement towards downsizing, de-cluttering and getting rid of stuff that doesn’t spark joy (hello, Marie Kondo) is wildly popular.
These approaches to organizing our stuff — and our thoughts — are rooted in developing an appreciation for what we already have. They also emphasize the value of experience over material possessions, but there is still focus on external factors as being key to our internal state of being.
We can all benefit from taking a good, hard look at the clutter on our counter tops and the dozens of pairs of shoes stacked in the closet. Taking the time to simply ask ourselves if all this stuff is making us happy — and then dealing with the question of whether more of it somehow fill our happiness quota — is uncomfortable.
Questioning prevailing cultural myths often leads to discomfort and it forces us to consider what we’ll replace these beliefs with. Without a solid answer we’re left hanging in a void of confusion that typically results in us falling back into our old patterns and ways of being.
While getting rid of stuff and moving away from consumerism towards an existence that’s grounded in experience sounds like a great idea, it should be done cautiously. In an effort to live life to the fullest, we swap our stuff for a life of travel and adventure. I’ve seen this from the usual suspects (unattached college grads and underemployed Millennials) who quit their job, and run off to Thailand for a year, and I’ve also seen families with really young children sell their home and most of their possessions, buy and RV and travel full time.
It sounds exciting and life changing, but again the circumstances of our happiness are attached to things and experiences outside of ourselves. They require us to make a big change and turn our lives upside down in order to feel happy.
As a result we’re consistently hustling and trying to earn our happiness and a failure to do so means that somehow we’re less worthy of the experience. The message is that we don’t deserve to be happy or to feel anything other than depression because of what we lack.
Joy on the other hand is a uniquely personal experience that doesn’t ask for you to sell your house, buy a horse and live off the grid in the mountains of Colorado. It doesn’t keep you broke and baffled as to where you’re going to stash your three new pairs of shoes from your most recent retail therapy session. Your kids don’t have to be on their best behavior and dressed in neatly ironed shirts from the Gap, at the ready for a perfect Instagram photo. Joy asks you to look inside yourself and let it out of the box.
We carry joy with us wherever we go and in whatever we do, but acknowledging that fact and allowing ourselves to experience it is a challenge. It requires mindfulness and the ability to sit and acknowledge the present moment.
Joy comes from our ability to cultivate acceptance of who we are, where we are and how we connect with others. More often than not joy is found when we slow down and appreciate the simple things, and replace instant external gratification with introspection.
Ultimately, each of us is responsible for creating a life that brings us joy. We all crave it and bask is its comfortable embrace when we experience it, but we end up chasing after it with the wrong shoes on. While we should be lacing up a quality pair of distance running shoes and preparing for a long haul, we’ve got ourselves the most lightweight sprinters available on the market.
We’re conditioned to seek joy by doing whatever makes us happy externally and in the shortest possible amount of time. Challenging this practice takes time and can be uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to develop a lasting, more permanent state of joy in our lives day in and day out.
We choose where we spend our time, energy and resources. We choose how we interpret, understand or contextualize our thoughts, actions and beliefs. Our internal state of well-being is our responsibility and the outcomes rest with us.
While external factors may make us happy for a short period of time, these feelings will always be fleeting and don’t contribute to a larger sense of joy or contentment. The stability and permanence of joy should be what we’re all after, and each of us can choose how we find it.
What this means in actual practice is stepping away from the noise and finding time, even 10 or 15 minutes, to sit with your thoughts and get to know yourself a bit better. Initially, this may be uncomfortable because you’re opening yourself up to the vastness of your own emotional terrain, and not every emotion is happy or joyful.
There will be sadness, regret and anger. It could be that you feel ashamed, unworthy or unlovable. Learning to sit with these emotions and not trying to chase them away with a Netflix binge, a pint of ice cream or scroll through social media takes practice. You don’t need to be perfect, but you need to be present and open to evaluating all that you are and all that you have.
It’s with this gentle awareness where an appreciation for the wonder and magic in the everyday moments in our lives is cultivated. From here a sense of gratitude can grow and flourish despite what external circumstances we may be facing. Choosing joy is a daily practice that doesn’t come without a commitment to doing hard work, but the long term pay off is well worth the ongoing investment.
Living a Life Filled With Joy Is Entirely Your Responsibility
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