Discovering Your Joys
Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash
A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
On a late afternoon walk with my children, we discover a barefoot man making enormous bubbles in the sunshine. The kids beeline for him and, together, we spend the better part of an hour darting across fields and park pathways popping hundreds of glittering orbs. A bucket of soapy water, a stick and a string are all this young man needs to enrapture a crowd of the young and young at heart.
As I watch him, I find myself wondering: How old are you? How are you free to spend a weekday afternoon blowing bubbles? Who made you so playful?
Bubble man is wearing a black t-shirt with a holy Mary silkscreened on the front, her upturned lips ceding consent. Let the children come to me. He has an open, youthful face. Laughs easily. Leaves a hat out for anyone who feels like tossing a coin in. Never mentions it though. Neverminds it. Minds his bubbles and the children and the grass between his toes. Minds the delicious March sunshine.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that a person’s true delight is to do the things they were made for.
Delight. Joy. This impulse may give some insight into why, under duress in the pandemic days of 2020, the world took up bread baking. As the cast of the Broadway musical Come from Away sings: “I need something to do ’cause I can’t watch the news,” we too sought out creative contributions to make meaning in the midst of global upheaval.
We learned to play instruments. Zoomed loved ones. Baked challah. Checked on neighbours.
We began noticing and nurturing the things that bring us joy.
I asked readers, friends, and members of my digital well-being program, Navigate, what brought them joy. Here’s what they told me:
Looking back through old journals
Being generous
Cuddling
Laughing with family
Tulips
Reading aloud to loved ones
Candles burning
Following through on promises
Reading stories of endurance
Getting dressed up
Playing chess
Asking for help
Blanket forts
Walks in the neighbourhood
Learning something new
Playing piano
Biking
Hikes in the woods
Jogging
Organizing things
Colors
Getting things done
Linear abstract art with nonlinear explanations
Hip hop beats
When friends understand
Writing
Waking up early
Making progress toward goals
Determination
Confetti
Turquoise
Sending and receiving snail mail
Stamps
Typewriting
Helping others
Receiving words of encouragement
Deep work
Flow
Freedom of the email autoresponder
Pretty pens
Being fully alive
Connecting with friends
Making things
Spending time with kids
Singing
Marriage
Cooking
Cats
Fires
Engaging with nature
Songwriting
Silence
Learning
Musicals
Dogs
Spending time out in nature, rain or shine
Teaching swimming
Being with family
Watching baking shows and making our own competition at home
Snow
Shoveling snow
The ocean
Poetry
Felting
The feel of feet buried in sand
Sunrises
Sunsets
Rowing
Church
Barbecues
Lake swimming
Camping
Handwritten notes
Stickers
Good tunes
Live music
Growing things
Making new friends
Overtipping
Mending things
Treasure hunts
Lying under the stars
Swimming with phosphorescence
Swings
Carrot cake
Swing dancing
Forgiving others
Being forgiven
Hammocks
Collecting
Building things
Being economical
Letting things go
Little free libraries
Tapir .gifs
Road trips
Being with brothers and sisters
Zoolander
Long walks and deep conversation with a friend
Gardening
Live events
Fishing
Going slow
Kayaking
If you lost count, there were more than one hundred. Say it out loud: One. Hundred. Joys. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? Now, let’s make this your own.
Here’s a challenge. Right now, begin your own list of 100 things. Start by writing down 5 things that bring you joy right now. Don’t skip this step. You’ll see why later. I’ll wait.
Look back at your list. What do you notice about your joys? Are there any commonalities? How many are people? About your relationship with yourself? Animals? Objects? Experiences? How many are about movement or the natural world?
Here’s what I discovered after years of studying the relationships between technology and joy:
1. Your joys are offline, though technology can help you connect to them.
2. Your joys are connected to your attention and your effort.
3. You can find joy in hard things.
Let’s explore.
Defining Your Joy
Discovering what you love is one of the greatest joys and, though you might not have known it, you’ve been doing it all your life.
Lying in a field as a child and noticing tiny bright buds drawing themselves forward and backward with the wind.
I love buttercup yellow.
Exploring the world of love in your adolescence.
I love boys who make me laugh.
Choosing a career path with integrity — true to your desires.
I love helping people.
Trying your hand at weeding and planting on your friend’s farm.
I love whole days spent kneeling in the soil.
No one else can define your joy. You can and must discover your joys for yourself if you want to know what you were made for.
Not sure what your joys are? Here’s an action plan, a simple one: It’s rooted in a centuries-old contemplative practice, and one of the reasons I know it’s such an effective tool for well-being is that it’s been renamed, repackaged, and repeated with its essential function left intact countless times.
It originated more than four hundred years ago as the Examen of Consciousness by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and has been called “moving toward and away” by motivational psychologists, “energizing and de-energizing habits” by even more motivational psychologists, “life-giving and life-taking practices” by spiritually-centered leadership and relationship experts… and I call it pursuing joy versus despair.
Whatever you call it, whatever philosophical tradition you’re rooting it in, my action plan is an essential resource you can carry with you every day, helping you choose what to do next and discern the right way to go — toward joy.
Here it is.
Tonight, and every night, before you go to sleep, ask yourself these two questions:
1. What was the most life-giving experience of my day?
2. What was the most life-taking experience of my day?
Not yesterday, not when you were a kid, not what you’re worried about tomorrow, but today. You can use whatever language you want to describe this: I use life-giving and life-taking, but you can say joy vs. despair, energizing vs. de-energizing.
However you name it, you are actively separating your experiences into things that, if repeated, if pursued, will move you towards joy, and things that will move you away from it. And so the hardest part of moving forward, deciding the right thing to do, has already been done. What do you want? You want joy - the unique experiences, relationships, and things that make you alive.
If you do this tonight, what might it look like? Maybe your most life-giving experience today was holding your partner’s hand as you walked down the street, and your most life-taking was agreeing to do a totally voluntary activity that you really didn’t want to.
These realizations are valuable. They are how you honestly, actively, and with greater self-awareness, admit fundamental truths to yourself about what will lead you toward a more joyful life.
In this case, maybe those truths are these:
I want more simple intimacy with my partner.
I want to learn how to say no.
What happens then? You move toward the joy you seek. In this case, you might move toward seeking and requesting mutual intimacy, and move away from people-pleasing and the tyranny of “should.” You miss out on something- the relative ease of going along with something and not speaking up- and gain something in its place: comfort with expressing what you need and building the intimacy that you want.
You give up the things that don’t truly serve your success and well-being. You make the sometimes incredibly hard decisions to leave them behind. But they don’t leave an empty space- life moves too fast for that. The things you give up are replaced right away by the things you’re moving toward- the things you’ve chosen.
. . . .
Originally posted on my new dedicated blog on Medium.com
