More Joy
Katherine Center used this book as inspiration for her newest title, What You Wish For. I wrote about it here if you’re interested.
A few years ago, my word of the year was “joy.” I realized that I was letting fear and anxiety eat up my days and my nights; I didn’t live with abandon and happiness like I used to. I missed looking forward to things and resented always planning worst-case scenarios. I wanted to feel free and peaceful. I wanted bliss.
I realize that expecting a life of nothing but joy is silly and naive. Every life has what seems like more than its fair share of suffering. This year alone has really made joy a struggle. And yet some people manage to take joy with them in their pain, and I wanted to be that kind of person.
Although I increased the joy in my life, I couldn’t really explain how. I had tried things--keeping a list of delightful things that happened at work, pulling positive reminders out of aggravating things, even breathing practice to calm the mind and to use in prayer. I had paid attention to a lot more of the sweet moments that I had formerly worried right past, and I had worked on being present in the ordinariness of my own life. My old blog was a big help to me in this process, as I had a place to record the normal moments of beauty and joy, but I still didn’t feel like I had a solid handle on pulling the threads of joy all through the fabric of my life, and I didn’t have clear ideas on other ways to create joy.
Enter Ingrid Fetell Lee, a designer who turned her attention to studying joy. Her book, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, helped me find language to articulate how to create joy in my life. Lee uses broad categories, or aesthetics--energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal--that illustrate places where joy hides. Through stories and research, she shows how we respond to these areas in ways that give us joy.
Lee explains that we respond more strongly to some of the areas than others. For me, harmony, freedom, play, surprise, and celebration are strong sources of joy. Lee describes ways to recognize and instigate these attributes, so that we can bring joy anywhere. Her stories and experiences were fun, and her research was convincing. I admit that I came to this book wanting to be convinced, but her ideas and conclusions really made sense, and her workbooks at the end helped me get clear ideas on how I could apply these techniques to my life. I especially loved the pages that contained the Joyful Palette, which was a list of each aesthetic and a breakdown of its attributes, and I am looking forward to using the guidelines to plan touches of joy to my wardrobe, office, and home.
In her introduction, Lee says, “You have a whole world of joy right at your fingertips...Too often, we move through the physical world as if it were a stage set, a mute backdrop for our daily activities. Yet in reality it is alive with opportunities for inspiration, wonder, and joy.” The ideas that Lee describes are often the anchors lowered by God to help us hang on, to lighten our pain, to remind us that there is so much more to this world and this life than the sadness that sometimes seems overwhelming. Read this book and open your eyes to all the possibilities for joy, already there in your own everyday existence.