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Joy

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Solving the joy drought

September 21, 2018

Joy, beautiful joy. I’m talking pure, uninhibited, rainbows-shooting-out-of-your-body-holes joy. The subject has been on my mind lately and, I guess you could say, I’m on a special mission to start tracking it down. I want to observe joy in its natural habitat and then plot how I can begin trapping it. It’s survival, really. It’s to feed my soul.

When my kids are swept up in joy, I can taste it in the air they’re exhaling. I can feel the temperature go up as the joy radiates off of their smiling faces and vibrating bellies, shaking with those good, deep giggles. It is a tangible experience, my daughters swept up in joy.

With me, it’s more discreet. I have to pick up the boulders and kick the dirt around a little bit to uncover the joy. It’s there, no doubt. It just doesn’t shine off of me like a polished nickel in the sun, the way it does from my girls. Joy whispers at my heart, only shouting when the cost of missing it is too great.

And honestly, I think a lot of us are missing it. According to the Harris Poll, which included responses from 2,202 Americans ages 18 and older, only 33% of Americans surveyed said they were happy, the beautiful byproduct of joy. In 2016, just 31% of Americans reported the same. I mean, we’re improving, but a lousy 33%? Math isn’t necessarily my jam, but I’m pretty sure that means that if 10 of us were standing in a room together, only two of us and a pregnant lady would claim to be happy. We’re experiencing a torrential downpour of apathy and a desperate joy drought, and I can’t help but complain about the weather.

For the sake of research, I folded up a piece of scrap paper and put it in my purse. I decided to make note of all of the moments I felt joy during the week. Real talk: I averaged about four instances of joy a day, but approximately 40% of those tallies could be attributed to food and 10% to professional wins. Is food a source of joy? Perhaps. But it feels more like something that should go under the pleasure category, which, in my mind, is tied up to the senses a bit tighter than joy.

I wanted to expand my sample size, so I called my brother, Matt, on my drive over to visit my mom, who was recovering from back surgery in the hospital. “How often do you experience joy in a day?” I asked him. “Can I give you a negative number?” he snapped back, before quickly amending his answer to “once”.

Minutes later, I settled into a plastic recliner next to Mom’s bed and asked her the same question. “I don’t think I do feel joy everyday,” she answered. “It really depends on how much I’m around my kids and my grandkids. I mean, I talk to people on the phone at work all day, and they’re so nice, but I don’t feel, like, a burst of joy.”

Later, when Matt came up to the hospital, the three of us picked the conversation back up. Having chewed on the question a bit, my brother decided that he has more joy in his life than he initially thought. His kids bring him joy. His clients bring him joy. And then, because what else does family do when one of them is healing, the three of us filled up the modest space with laughter and stories for a few hours. After my brother left, I put another tally on my scrap of paper, thus debunking the theory that joy, like fortune or luck, alludes those who speak its name out loud. Just talking about joy had been the spark to its flames.

By dawn the next day, I was getting downright greedy. I never played, but for once I could relate to all those crazies who went on that Pokemon binge a few years back. I’d gamified instances of joy, and now I wanted more and more and more of it. I wanted more smiles, more laugh tears, more tallies. Hi, my name is Courtney, and while I’d describe myself as generally happy, I am a self-proclaimed joy junkie. The scribbled moments on my list, the treasures under the boulders, the whispers inside me, there just aren’t enough of them.

There’s a solution to everything and inviting strategy into the pursuit certainly lends a certain sophistication to the quest. Remembering there’s a reason I read, I went back through some of my voice memos from my favorite authors and grabbed a trifecta of philosophies on joy. Here’s how the gurus say we can tap into a goldmine of joy.

We can choose it.

Writer Gabrielle Bernstein says that “happiness is a choice I make.” To me, joy, by nature, feels more organic. I think of it like a gift from the universe and all her conspiring forces. Moments of joy certainly spawn happiness, and so I might amend Gabby’s statement here to say that choosing to seek out and celebrate joy is a choice. Choosing to slow down enough to spot and let the joy sink in is a choice. Choosing to let joy be kindling for your happiness is a choice.

One of the items on my list was overhearing an exchange between JoJo (my oldest) and Sloppy Joan (my youngest) getting ready for school. SJ is going through a phase where she wants her sisters to help her get dressed, rather than her flustered, bossy mother. On this morning, she’d picked her oldest sibling to help her make sure the tags were in the back. From down the hall, I looked on as my JoJo, who often wrestles with patience herself, sweetly guide her sister’s tooties into her socks, one at a time. Then her undies, then her shorts, then her shirt, coaching her to pull arms through and rewarding her with kind words as the process progressed.

On any given weekday morning, I am doing five things at once, lecturing being the most consistent of those tasks. “Brush your teeth. Grab a sweatshirt. Turn the light off. Put the clothes in the hamper. Go get underwear. Find your shoes. Tie your shoes. Hurry up and eat.” But because my joy receptors were engaged, on that morning, I stopped. I chose to see joy. And the interesting thing is, if I were a betting woman, I’d put all my money down that there is a moment just like that moment hidden in the midst of most chaotic mornings.

Slowing down for joy is a choice. Happiness is a choice.

We can stop being so damn judgy.

A few months back I listened to “The Book of Joy” by Archbishop Desmund Tutu and the Dalai Lama. There was a whole lotta zen in that bad boy, but one of my favorite points they made was about the relationship between love and joy.

According to the enlightened pair, most humans are prone to practice biased love. We love our kids, our families, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors. But beyond that, we struggle to empathize and open our hearts. We operate as if there’s a limited capacity for love. But when we stop thinking about ourselves and the people in our inner circle exclusively, we can find joy for humanity.

They went on to explain that self-involved thinking leads to anger and depression. It’s a script we’ve all read. “Why did I do that? Why didn’t they pick me? Why did I eat that? I’m such a failure.” How is joy supposed to penetrate all of that negative noise? But thinking of others, shifts us toward compassion, and it’s really hard to be an unhappy asshole when you’re acting from a place of compassion.

As a writer, I get to tell a lot of stories. Nothing brings me more joy than when the words take shape on the screen and I’m able to capture the bravery or strength or character of another human being. Exchanging stories under the umbrella of this great big world is a powerful connector. Feeling connected encourages the tendency toward compassion, and compassion breeds joy.

Stop being so stingy with your love.

We can be grateful for it.

This whole thing started for me because I just finished Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness.” In it, she writes, “Joy is probably the most vulnerable emotion we experience. We’re afraid if we allow ourselves to feel it, we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment. That’s why in moments of real joy, many of us dress rehearse tragedy. We see our child leave for prom and all we can think is, car crash. We get excited about an upcoming vacation and we start thinking hurricane. We try to beat our vulnerability to the punch by imagining the worst or by feeling nothing in hopes the other shoe will drop. I call it foreboding joy.”

This was the passage. It was the switch that turned me on and got me thinking about how many times joy has shown up at my front door and I either didn’t answer or I turned it away. Maybe I turned it away because it scared me, or because I was worried about what others would think if I invited it in, or because I was too freaking busy to hear the bell.

I think of joy as a God wink. A gift. But after talking to others and writing it down and searching within myself, it also feels like a rarity. Like, of all of the moments in a day, the ones that bring joy are too often the exception. But reading Brene’s work makes me wonder if we’re all just scared to open ourselves up and let more of it in.

People are constantly telling me, “Don’t blink, your kids will be gone before you know it,” and “Enjoy it. It all goes so fast.” And while I know these points to be true, they also fuel my own foreboding joy. As soon as I tune into a happy moment, I instantly try to wrap my arms around it and squeeze it into my soul and my forever memory. I suffocate it. Like a fart in a tornado, I want to hold onto it, but it’s impossible. The presence of joy makes me simultaneously mourn its expiration. And how could it not, when every person and every message around you warns of how fleeting it is?

So give me a solution, Brene.

Gratitude, she says. The fastest way to access joy and trap it for a bit is through an attitude of gratitude. Carving out time to count your blessings, the big ones and the small ones, can extend the high. It can be like living the moment all over again.

I’ve tried to make meditation part of my daily routine for years, with extremely mild success. But typically, when I workout in the mornings I have about 5 minutes where I can sit in silence. No one else is awake in the house and it’s only me, my thoughts and the settling walls. Earlier this week, during one of these brief sittings, I was given the gift of reflection. When I closed my eyes, I saw my family running through a beautiful forest. I could hear their laughter and I could see their toothless grins and I felt a peace I hadn’t felt in days. I got quiet enough that I could visit with gratitude, and in return, she brought her best friend joy. And I was so thankful because guests like that don’t show up every day.

The truth is, most of us aren’t short on blessings. We’re short on fingers and toes on which to count them. Right now, I’m sitting at my dining room table. An hour ago I kissed my oldest daughters and put them on the school bus. I kissed my husband. I kissed my baby, butter from her toast still salty on her tiny lips. The sunlight is warming my hands and steaming in between the swaying branches on the trees behind our fence. My coffee is just strong enough. I’m typing the final words of a post I’ve been coming back to for days.

I am happy.

In this moment, I have joy. And I hope you do, too.

Wanderlust

Vacation: All I’ve ever wanted (to trap in my basement forever)

June 22, 2018

Last week, Hank and I loaded up our family wagon and our three little chicks and headed east to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. It was a real vacation. The kind where you let your hair go frizzy and read a full book, cover to cover. The good kind. The slow kind. The transformative kind of vacation.

We left right after work and Hank drove into the night. I fell asleep to the mesmerizing passing of the reflectors in the center line and sporadic headlights somewhere in Ohio and awoke around 2 a.m. in West Virginia. Sloppy Joan was in and out of sleep, thrashing and whining every 5 minutes or so. The timer had popped; our little turkey was done. After we pulled her and the others out of the car and stumbled into our double queen room, she shocked us all with an allstar rally, positively giddy at the excitement of a hotel room.

We walked out to the car Saturday morning to discover our surroundings. It was like falling asleep in the depths of tall grass only to wake up in a field of towering sunflowers. We were in the mountains now. Beautiful, lush green Moana mountains. A soft fog was settled in between the peaks, with the morning sunlight piercing through the smoke. It was breathtaking. I held my lukewarm morning coffee, sipping and soaking in the unexpected beauty, crests enveloping us on every side.

More than 9 hours and 15 potty pit stops later, we arrived at our home away from home for the week. Sure as an army of ants will follow a trail of tacos, a curious child will take a flight of stairs as far up as they go. So was the case with our chicks, as they flew up to the eagle’s nest deck before we even went into the house. This third level structure was constructed solely to twist and torture my fears of a child tumbling to their doom, but redeemed itself by providing a view that drained my lingering stress pangs. As they turned to run back down the way they came, I closed my eyes as my ears found what they’d been seeking since we crossed the south bridge onto the island: Waves. The rolling crescendo was punctuated only by the chatter of carefree seagulls. To the east, blue waters. To the west, the sun setting over the sound. There, standing on the treetops, I took a true breath for the first time in two months.

The house was perfect for our little crew. Bunk beds for the girls, a king-size mattress for me and the Mr., a fully functioning kitchen, living room and cool blue color palette. We stayed in Hatteras, which was the southernmost area of the Outer Banks, and much less commercial than some of the other sections. This was what the doctor ordered. There was a market with a friendly grocer just up the street, a handful of eateries, a nature center and a Wings, brimming with cheap ocean crap. We required little more.

It took me until Monday to really feel it. Sitting in a lowrider beach chair, cold beer in hand, watching my girls building a sand castle with my husband beside me, I realized I was light. Nothing mattered. We had nowhere to be and no one to answer to. We were five souls set free for at least six more days, though I tried not to count them. There’s a weightlessness that comes with severing the tethers to your everyday life that can’t be described or replicated. It’s the closest one can come to true peace, I think.

That afternoon, a sweet gal who’d been coming to the area since she was a child – one of the many kind people we encountered on our trip, which also included a 55-year-old nurse who loaned Spike her kite that Hank eventually had to chase through sand dunes and up telephone poles – became our personal Hatteras insider. For starters, at our new friend Kim’s advisement, I began putting coconut oil in the girls’ hair in the mornings to avoid those pesky beach tangles. Game changer! Aside from grooming, and among other dining and sea creature pointers, she also gave us a tip that would change our agenda for the remainder of our vacation.

“Oh! And you have to come out at night to see the ghost crabs,” Kim said.
“OK,” I nodded, feeling sceptical but unseasoned.

And so, one evening after dinner, I stayed in with Sloppy Joan as Hank and the older two dug up flashlights, doused themselves in bug spray, and trotted down to the shore in the dark in search of these special night creatures. When they hadn’t returned after 30 minutes, I assumed our tour guide might have been off. But no. I was distracted from my fourth consecutive episode of Chopped (We don’t have cable anymore) when I caught a tunnel of light on the porch out of the corner of my eye. It was Spike, pressing her face against the glass sliding door, shining the light up her nose like a camp counselor unwrapping a juicy tale about escaped serial killers. She stormed in.

“Mom! You won’t believe it,” she exclaimed. She was sorting through the words scattered and sprinting through her little head.
“Tell me!” I urged.

JoJo came in, Hank trailing behind her, a fog of Off! aggressively, offensively penetrating my nostrils.

“There were these white crabs everywhere!” Spike said.
“Really?” I exaggerated my enthusiasm.
“Really,” JoJo took over. “And there were big ones, and small ones and they were so fast – right, Dad – so fast!”
“So fast,” Hank agreed.
“That’s so cool! We should have gone with you,” I said.
“Yeah! But we’re going to go every night. Dad said we can go every night,” Spike said.

And we did.

Each night, drunk on a heavy dinner of fried fare, senseless carbs and some form of ice cream, we would change into long sleeves and pants and walk under more stars than we’d ever seen back to the beach. We’d wait until the last possible second to turn on our lights and once we did, we’d be met with hundreds of sets of beady little black eyes. Hank would try to catch them, an endearing glimpse of him as a curious child. Their mechanical legs were deceptively speedy. The girls would move from one to the next, screeching while proclaiming they weren’t afraid of them one bit.

But it was Sloppy Joan who confronted their master. One evening, our fearless third born took the end of her flashlight and poked at a particularly large crab repeatedly, until the crustacean was forced to raise up on his hind legs and point his pinchers toward his opponent. The four of us stood around her, shouting like drunk 40-year-olds at an MMA fight.

“Oh my gosh!”
“Get ‘em SJ!”
“You’ve got this!”
“Back up!”
“Poke him!”
“Put the flashlight down!”
“Hit him! Hit him!”
“Stop it! Stop it!”
“Oh for–!”
“Yes! Yes!”

Eventually Hank grabbed her and pulled her out of the ring as the giant crab scurried away, one eye on the insane family from Indiana, and one eye on the freedom of his sand hole. We stood there for a few minutes, watching lightning in the clouds somewhere far off over the ocean, and let the adrenaline wash away with the tide.

Spike had her sights set on a conch shell. It was all she wanted, and let me tell you, when Spike wants something, she’s going to make that shit happen. Speculating that the most prized shells came ashore first thing in the morning, I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. I went in to find her nestled next to JoJo, her mouth gaping open in complete surrender to sleep. I shook her gently and asked if she wanted to go sunrise shell hunting. She was dressed in 3 minutes and we were quietly slipping out onto the porch.

It was a first for both of us; Sunrise on the beach.

I let my brunette beauty walk on ahead and, because they were so sweet, I committed the moments to memory, so I could always remember her that way: The golden ball of the day’s first light at her shoulder, rising above the sand dunes and illuminating her bronzed cheeks. The toothless smile and unbridled joy when she finally found her shell. The surprising size of her footprints in the surf staggered next to mine, proof my baby’s growing up too fast.

By Thursday, I was starting to feel heartsick over the thought of our week coming to an end. I had become accustomed to our lazy routine. Our days consisted of hours on the beach, interrupted only temporarily every few hours by food and sleep. Our girls, only one of which had been to the sea, had become uninhibited mermaids, in spite of two jellyfish stings for Spike and a traumatic crab pinch.

Watching them in the waves, because they were so sweet, I committed the moments to memory. So I could always remember them that way: SJ standing in the surf in a neon pink bikini, her piercing eyes beneath the brim of her matching sun hat. Her browned skin. Her smile. The relaxed waves in her hair and a stormy sky behind her. My JoJo running confidently across the tide, surfing and splashing and begging me to watch as she does it all over again.

Reality is a force greater than any magnet. It is a gravitational pull you can only outrun for so long, and soon it was time for us to leave. As the miles between our little sliver of paradise and our home, our jobs, our responsibilities grew smaller, the nagging circumstances we’d temporarily abandoned returned. Texts and emails started flashing on our phones. The older two started arguing in the back. The universe knew the sand was running out in our magical hourglass.

Why is it so dang hard to hold onto that vacation nirvana? Retaining that calm is like trying to hogtie the wind or stand in a rainbow. Impossible.

When I meditate now, I picture the waves. I picture myself sitting in that chair staring into the horizon with my daughters’ freckled cheeks and soaring birds peppered in. I try to smell the saltwater air. I grasp at the peace, but it evaporates in my desperate hands.

How do we carry it home with us? How do we bottle up that zen so we can sip from the vessel a little at a time as needed, buying time until we can replenish the contents all over again?

When I was on vacation, I had ideas. Ideas for books. Ideas for our home. Ideas about how I was going to change our lives and be less short-tempered and seize every second. I was all juiced up on joy and high on leisure. Now I’m frantically sniffing out a source for my next hit. It feels like our traditional roles are rigged to favor routine. Like we walked into an arranged marriage with monotony.

Eight summers. I have eight summers left until my JoJo is 18 and no longer obligated to be around me. Do I want her to remember me as list-loving Mommy or wave-riding Mommy? Ideally I could be like an Oreo. A sweet, enjoyable layer of happiness sandwiched between two essential spheres of structure and stability. I want to inject enough of my vacation self into my life that, overall, they remember me being pretty darn enjoyable overall.

Ah, vacation … you beautiful summer fling. I’ll never forget you.

Thoughts, Uncategorized

Thanksgiving and 31 flavors of joy

November 29, 2017

I’ve really been getting into joy lately. I think because sometimes, if I’m not careful, joy can feel like a bit of a unicorn. And, let’s be honest, who wants to live in a world where the most pleasant of emotions is as rare as a leprechaun sighting in Alabama? (Or is that really rare, after all?)

Here’s the thing, I fight fear like most people fight the flu; proactively minimizing my exposure and sniffing out supplements to stack the deck. That’s not only for my own sanity (though that’s the primary reason), but also to prove a point. Because sometimes I think those who seek to instill fear get the most pleasure out of creating the illusion that it exists. It’s the scary music. The mask. Sometimes I think that gets them off even more than carrying out the actual act that elicits the fear. I’m trying to strip it of its power. I’m trying to diffuse the pressure cooker of potential catastrophes lurking in both my imagination and my newsfeed.

It’s a work in progress. Some days I notice every nuance of the sunrise and some days I hyperventilate over whether my children will see their twenties.

But this past week I was so aware of joy, you guys. I was bathing in it. It felt more tangible than it’s felt in months. I could hear it, see it, taste it. Joy! In all its delicious flavors.

Why? I don’t know … lots of reasons. As the years go by, Thanksgiving becomes one of my favorite holidays. It brings some of my most treasured traditions. The 4-mile race, cold and challenging. It wakes me up and makes me uncomfortable in that way that can only be followed by extreme elation once complete. Then we go out for a warm, carb-loaded, maple syrup-soaked breakfast with a flowing stream of creamed coffee. Everything tastes like joy after a chilly trot in 30-degree weather.

Then I love going home to watch the parade with the girls, waiting for Santa to come down a crowded New York street, confetti flying around his jolly bearded head. Then the dog show, with the wild-haired breeds no one’s ever heard of. I savor the satisfaction of packing up the food we’ve prepared to share – this year, cucumber sandwiches, crescent rollups with garlic and red pepper and a vanilla bundt cake – and loading everyone into the car.

For the past few years, Hank’s Grandma Marge hadn’t been well. I remember two years ago on Thanksgiving, we all took pictures with Grandma, an unspoken nod to the reality of her condition and fleeting time with her beautiful face. This year, there was talk of babies and ripples of laughter. Life, it seems, has gone on, and there is still joy to be had. Next year, there will be a new beautiful face at our dinner. A sweet little boy.

Friday morning, all I had to do was have Hank get the red and green totes out of the attic for the chicks to release their unbridled cheer all over the first floor of our house. JoJo pulled out every homemade ornament we had – stick-on jewels and stretch cotton ball beards – and hung them on everything standing still. Every thing. She put a string of plastic snowflakes around the handle for the freezer. She threw gold glittered Christmas trees in potted plants. She was running around like Buddy the Elf at Gimbel’s. Joy! I said to myself as I saw it run past. This is what joy looks like!

And then there’s my Spike and her powder pink ukulele. I hear her sometimes, strumming the strings in a quiet corner of an empty room. She’s more of a songwriter, see. She’s about the lyrics. After two days of mumbling along with an unfamiliar melody, my brunette beauty came out and told me she was ready to share her song. She sat down, wearing nothing but a camp t-shirt and a pair of fuzzy boots, and she poured her little heart out.

Mya from Courtney Leach on Vimeo.

It was a song about Mya, who is our dog. But this tune was not about our dog, specifically. Mya was the name of the fictional dog who runs away in the song. It’s moving … haunting, and I’m kicking myself for stopping the video just shy of her dramatic finish; three deliberate strums and unbroken eye contact. She was so proud of herself and her moving tribute to puppies, even though she hasn’t been able to replicate the tune since. Joy, in the key of who the hell cares.

Saturday we lit the lights at my parents’ house. The Grand Lighting, as we call it. Every year, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, my mom works her ass off to make all our favorites – turkey, deviled eggs, stuffing, broccoli salad, gravy and mashed potatoes – and we all sit around laughing over the same stories we’ve been laughing about for 30 years, while Dad bitches about outlets and breakers.

It’s one of those traditions steeped in self-inflicted inconvenience. My dad’s dad, Red, was huge on Christmas displays. In turn, my dad was. Until one year, he wasn’t. But the damage had been done. We all had expectations by that point. Not to mention the grandkids who’d come along by then. And so, with my mom taking over the helm, the exterior illumination show has gone on. And we, the display’s humble admirers, still stumble outside, bellies full and wine in hand, to watch as the strings of twinkle lights shine for the first time. And it’s one of my favorite nights of the year.

We sat down for a round of Cards Against Humanity afterward. I’m tellin’ ya, you just haven’t lived until you’ve heard your mother utter the phrase, “tasteful sideboob” or “Lance Armstrong’s missing testicle”. The sound of joy.

The final day of our long weekend was also Mom’s birthday. Matt took over Big Breakfast to give our folks a little break. This family tradition is rich in joy; loud, sticky, buttery joy. The people I love most in my life, sleepy eyed in plaid pajama pants, gathering around mugs of strong coffee and plates of dippy eggs. The cousins – an army of girls punctuated by one teenage boy – flip in the front room, meandering in here and there to claim cinnamon rolls. The only rule at Big Breakfast is to come as you are.

And finally, last night I watched my three little girls hang a full tote of Hallmark ornaments on our happy little Christmas tree. One by one they picked up the ballerinas, the snowmen and the penguins wearing ice skates, and assigned them to the perfect branch. The Grinch was playing in the background, stealing their attention here and there. I should have made them go to bed by 8. I should have turned the movie off. But, the joy … oh, the joy.

The more I learn to grab it when I see it, the more I think joy is always there. Sometimes it’s concealed in discomfort, like change or unexpected news. Sometimes it takes awhile to shine through. But it’s there.

Sometimes it’s true, I have to kill a fair amount of fear so the joy has room to grow, but, like I said, I’m working on it. Worry will be the most overpowering weed in the garden if you let it. And Lord knows it’s easy to let it. But joy is where it’s at, I’m tellin’ ya. Joy is the remedy and the resolution. Let it filter in through every crack and see you through every shadow. Feel it, taste it, hear it, smell it, look for it … every day, everywhere.

Mindfulness

Wake me up so I don’t miss it

July 26, 2017

“Promise you’ll wake us up,” JoJo and Spike say, their eyes burning into mine. “Even if we’re dead asleep and you think we’ll be mad. We don’t want to miss your hugs and kisses.”

Oh, these accidental, magnificent insights.

My chicks have made an art form out of changing my crooked, bleak perspectives. I think kids in general have this way of sifting through the litter box of life and coming up with golden turds of unabashed happiness. It’s just something they’re born with that erodes a tiny bit every time someone tells them the Tooth Fairy is creepy or they watch an episode of Hannah Montana or That’s So Raven, or whatever preadolescent dribble the Disney channel feels like shoving down their throats.

I’m definitely making a conscious effort to catch all of their organic amazement before it evaporates entirely. I find, when I forget what wonder looks like, I can just watch their little faces during a thunderstorm. How their eyes widen every time a hot shard of electricity pierces the racing clouds or a rib-shaking ripple of thunder cracks down from the heavens. “God got a strike!” I tell them. “And all the angels took His picture.” Their instinctive fears spread to smirks and we watch until it passes. In these moments, my own sense of wonder starts to whisper from under a pile of rubble in my soul. “Help me … I’m still in here.”

But I want more. Without waiting for a temperamental warm front.

I keep coming back to it … Wake me up! Even if you think it’s going to make me mad. I don’t want to miss the hugs and kisses.

There was this afternoon a few summers ago, when I went to pick JoJo up from preschool, and Spike gasped and pointed down at the ground. She would have been about 3 at the time. “What?” I inquired. “What’s wrong?” JoJo gasped then, too, meeting the object of her sister’s jubilation. My eyes darted back and forth across the asphalt. What was I missing? Finally, “It’s a rainbow river!” JoJo offered. And there it was: ROYGBIV floating right there in a common oil spill. I didn’t see it. I saw someone’s misfortune; a pool of malfunction. That’s what I saw.

Why didn’t I see the rainbow?

The question bothered me.

But it’s not hard to answer. It’s so easy, in this life, with its pace and its pitfalls, to focus on things like moldy strawberries straight from the store, and my constant view of the tops of the heads of my tech-tethered loved ones, and the fact that the bathroom at work always smells like AquaNet, diarrhea and orange tictacs, and fitted sheets that refuse to dutifully cover all four corners of the mattress the way their packaging promised they would. But focusing on all the bad fruit and the poop paradise and other crap certainly doesn’t make any of it go away. A few years back, when I took an honest inventory, I realized I was giving all of the bruises on the apple of my life way too much attention.

And once I noticed my pessimism – once I named it – then I could finally start shutting it down.

How did I start shutting it down? Well, I decided to say “yes” more than “no”. It’s my attempt at a more spontaneous existence. I’ve been taking the sweet seconds to smile at my babies’ white tushies striding on top of their brown summer legs. Not always, but more often than not, I look over my shoulder at the sunset on my runs. And (this is the hard one) I’ve been pausing before I begin spewing obscenities and cursing people’s small-minded bullshit, and instead, using these moments as opportunities for grace. All these podcasts about how unique every person’s walk on this earth is, and how we can Make America Kind Again, are really starting to sink in. Still, I’d say I’m only at about a 65% adoption rate on this last one.

It takes practice to push all the fat winter flies and ingrown toenails of life aside and offer a larger portion of the pie to the positive stuff. But it is possible. I mean, the reality is that, even on the darkest days, there’s always a blue sky right on the other side of the clouds. (That’s some cross stitch shit right there, but you can still quote me on it.) I think once you make that decision, once you commit to think about what’s on the other side of the gray haze, you’re one step closer to peace.

Let’s be real, rain is always going to come. If every day was sunny we’d just take it for granted, right? But when those drops start to fall, you have a choice. You can pout inside a smudged window pane or grab your polka dot umbrella, some charming galoshes and a better attitude. I’m really trying to invest in the galoshes. It makes me like myself better.

And everyone else, too. The older I get, the lower my tolerance becomes for the pouters on the other side of the pane. The world is hard and scary and diseased. I. GET. IT. But I don’t need to sulk and soak in that sad bath with you every single day. It’s exhausting and, quite frankly, draining. Awareness is healthy. But when the heaviness of it all becomes an obsession, you’ve really just given up your power and turned me off. I’m learning to nourish the space between myself and the people with toxic tendencies, so that it can organically grow and buffer my soul.

Like anything, some exceptions will apply. Life can’t be like a season of Gilmore Girls. Things are going to happen. But, from this sunnier shore, I’m finding that pain can be beautiful, even healing. Long talks with someone who really needs your ear can be life-changing, for both parties. And that the uncomfortable stuff can be a powerful vehicle for personal evolution.

Is it all rose bushes and marigolds in my own yard all the time? Ah, no. And I don’t ignore the great tragedies of this world either. I don’t dismiss the just causes, or devastating diagnosis, or disturbing headlines. I don’t pretend to be so apathetic I can turn away from the morally corrupt circus playing out before us all in real time. It’s all still there. I didn’t abandon it. You can’t abandon it. But I’m finding that the more I lean toward the bright side, the easier it is to find the light switch on the darker days. The more I focus on fostering joy and putting a tight bandage on the infectious carcinogens that strangle my heart to contain them, the better off I seem to be. And the more powerful I feel.

One of my favorite people to talk to on the planet, recently told me that 99.9% of the time, your body breathes you. It’s automatic and involuntary. But when you breathe your body – when you take a moment to feel your stomach rise and fall and notice how your hair tickles your shoulders, and feel your daughter’s soft cheek against your own – that’s when you tap into the good stuff.

So, I’m into all that. Breathing my body and my people. Detaining the toxic bullshit and its carriers. And jumping into the joy parade. It’s my 3-step process for obtaining eternal optimism.

If you see me looking away – from an adorable baby with a mouth full of spit bubbles, or my girls smelling flowers or a sunrise painted with angelic brush strokes – just give me a little nudge. And dear God, please wake me up. Even if you think I’ll be mad. Because I never want to miss the hugs and kisses. I never want to miss the love. Or this life.