Naked November Day 8 :: Where & How We Find Joy
On November 8th I asked her, “Where do you find all your joy? Please tell me one thing you do every day to keep it up so high?” I didn’t know how much I would need to know her secret.
“I’m extremely curious…the details capture my attention…how can you not be joyful when there’s always something new to discover?”
Fast forward two days, I’m laying on my back with a foot raised above my heart to reduce swelling from surgery on my broken leg. My thoughts drifted to my friend, Mary. How would the next three months of recovery would look if I channeled all her energy and zest for life.
Prior to the accident, I was logging at least 10 miles a day running in addition to multiple trips on the bike around my city, now the furthest I will travel for at least the next few weeks is to the second story of my house to be bathed my patient nurse-husband. Otherwise, you’ll find me hauling my heavy cast around on my crutches, taking a few careful steps between couch, kitchen table chair, and toilet.
Her wisdom reverberates off my walls, the walls which once welcomed me home but now feel looming and threatening, “There’s always something new to discover.”
But what if it feels like my life has been shrunk down to the size of 1 inch square?
What if the most ambitious activity I do each day is pour myself a bowl of cereal and put on one shoe?
What if my only view for the majority of the next 6 weeks is my own living room and the hyper squirrels bouncing from limb to limb in the trees outside the window?
What then? I wonder what my friend would say in these types of situations.
Does she think it’s still possible to have joy when it seems like there’s nothing new to discover, when our whole world has collapsed in on itself?
I don’t even have to ask her because I can already guess.
With a radiant beams of sunshine flashing out from her eyes, she would say, “YES, joy is definitely still possible!”
And here’s why, because she never connected joy with…
travel,
wellness,
relationships,
weather,
or our current reality.
When I asked her, “Where do you find all your joy?” Her answer was one of those dangerously, simple-yet-profound ones, “In the details.”
So then, how do we become good at noticing this endless supply of sparkly details?
Well, she addressed that too. From Mary’s perspective, we devote ourselves to extreme curiosity.
Most of us race through our days, our projects, our work, our lives, like we would required reading material for a boring class, only stopping when we spot the bold font to signify something important we need to know.
We’ve lost our ability to read the finer print.
Our joy attaches to the big, important, monumental aspects of our life like dreamy vacations, idyllic situations, successful sales, loving relationships, or perfect health. All of which can let us down or disappear eventually.
But the details? They are always there for the taking, literally sitting right under our nose.
It reminds me of Ann Lamott who encourages overwhelmed writing students to pretend like they’re viewing the scene through a 1-inch picture frame. Start here first.
Enter into your own little life and pick up the crumbs, the looked-over bits, the quiet people, the intricate patterns, and the possibilities that exist within arms reach. These microscopic details are your most reliable source of joy.
They consistently permeate our lives with interesting textures, make our lives pop with color, and send us straight into a blissful, childlike state of wonder.
Shall we make it our mission to get lost in the details?!
I bet I know what Mary would say.