Do you remember when you were a child how you found everything to be so joyful and happy? That you were excited about going to see the latest movie, going out to play or spending the night with your friends? Playing with Playdough or climbing a tree? How the holidays brought you real authentic joy and excitement? There were many things that brought you joy and you embraced and didn't question it. So what happened? You became an adult.
Back in December, I strained calf muscle in my left leg. I'm sure you're thinking I injured it in some sporting event, or at the gym lifting weights, or picking up something heavy around the house. But no I will confess I did not injure my leg in any of those ways. I a 57-year-old man, strained my calf muscle from skipping! Yes I said skipping. My wife and I were out Christmas shopping, and we were having so much fun that I was consumed with the joy of it. At one of our many stops at a local shopping center, I enthusiastically bounced out of the car and took off skipping. After getting a few yards I realized I had a burning painful sensation in my left calf and I obviously injured myself. I had gotten out of the car in the cold without warming up and begin skipping, and hurt my leg. Does that mean I will never skip again? Of course not! When I'm consumed with joy I will skip or run or hop if I feel like it because that is the essence of joy. Just going for it like a kid would.
I travel all over the country as a professional speaker and consultant and I've noticed that most adults have given one thing up, and that is how to be joyful. A lot of times people tell me that they are adults and they have to be serious, and they have to work, and have to take care of their family, and have to take care of the house and I have a lot of responsibilities. I agree that that's all true and certainly not suggesting that you abandon your life and move to an island in Tahiti. What I am suggesting is that you can do all these things while still being joyful and having a joyful life. How do you go about having a life where you can be as joyful as a child? Here are a few suggestions to help you reconnect your joy.
• Stop being so darn serious -- I travel a lot as a professional speaker and I notice that many people in airports and on planes are just too darn serious. I know that traveling can be tiring can be hard on the body and the people are very busy. The joy has been sucked out of them. All that being said, what if you just decide to have fun and embrace and enjoy the adventure anyway? As Chuck Palahniuk once said, "Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home ... It's your responsibility to love it or change it."
• Reconnect to your joy -- I meet many people who have given up the very activities or hobbies that brought them joy. In a recent training program that I was facilitating, I asked people in the group what activities brought them joy. One woman in the group raised her hand and said that "being outside and hiking brought her great joy." When I asked her how being outside made her feel, she said that being outside "brought her joy and restored her soul." When I asked her how often she was outside and how often she hiked, she shocked me by responding "I'm never outside I'm too busy. " She then explained that she was a mother to three children, had a full-time job and many other time-consuming life responsibilities. So if for some reason in your life you have given up things that bring you joy -- try to see if you can reconnect by doing them again. I have played drums all my life and for a long period of time I stopped playing the drums due to various life circumstances. When I turned 50, I decided to purchase a set of electronic drums and started playing again. I noticed that only 30 minutes of playing drums brought me great joy that I had forgotten about.
• Find joy in your work -- are you happy at work or are you miserable? I recently checked into a hotel. The desk clerk behind the desk asked me how I was doing. I told her that "I was fantastic." She paused and looked up from her computer monitor, took a step back and putting her hands on her hips said, "What is your problem?" When I asked what she meant she said, "You are just too darn cheerful, and nobody can possibly be that happy." Keep in mind this is a person at the hotel was supposed to make me feel welcome when I arrive. So apparently she cannot seem to find a lot of joy in her work. So two suggestions: If you are in a job that you detest and it makes you miserable, then get the heck out. Life is too short to be in a job that you loathe. Try to find a job where you can be happy, or even better a job where you are doing what brings you joy. If for some reason that is not possible for you, then try to find the things about your job that you do enjoy, you do like, and stop focusing on all the things that you hate. As Pearl S. Buck once said "to find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth."
• Pursue and embrace love -- You may be single or you may be married. If you are single make it your goal to find the love of your life because you when you do, you will be filled with love and overflowing in your heart. If you're married, do the very best you can be the very best love to the person they are married to. Love them unconditionally. Love them with all your heart. When you love someone and you love them 1,000 percent and you show it, they will return to love to you tenfold. Embrace the love of family and friends, because they are after all the centerpiece of your life. As Jonathan Sacks once said, "Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity fun and joy. Without this you will burn out in midcareer wonder where your life went."
• Make a joy list -- in order to reconnect to your joy, take some time to write out a list of all the things that bring you joy, and really focus on trying to do the more. I talk about this in more detail in one of my other blogs here on The Huffington Post called "The Joy List: How to recapture joy after loss."
• Find the beauty -- Far too often we walk around so caught up in the "busy-ness" of life we don't stop to notice the beauty that is around us. I often marvel at the architecture inside an old train station, or the gargoyles looking over the edge of the big building in some city in America that no one ever notices him, or just the beauty of a sunset dropping down over the trees in the woods behind my house in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, I think we stop looking for it.
So in the end, seeking joy is a choice. We can choose to be stressed and worried and unhappy, or we can literally choose the opposite, which is to live a life of true joy. The reality is that every day we have a choice to make and it is yours. As Ralph Marston once said, "If you so choose each day can be filled with even more joy than the one before."