Hello and welcome to today’s blog post. It is so nice to be writing to you. It is a great to be using this channel to communicate these words. I hope they inspire you and brighten your day.
Today’s topic is about living with joy. Many people can relate with the idea of living a life well-lived. But what is a well-lived life if not a joyful life? Living a life of joy will automatically mean you are living a well-lived life!
So many people spend so much time thinking about things they are supposed to do, be, and have. Yet these things don’t necessarily add joy in their lives. Joy is what life can be about. Why can’t it for you?
Your life is yours, it is yours to live, to love, to learn, and to laugh. You get to create it. Why do you think you are here? Do you think you are here to suffer through life? Do you think you are here to cry, bemoan life, whine and wail at the injustice and the tragedies of life? Sure, you can do that. Yet was that your original intent? What do you think?
How do we live with joy? It is so simple. It is all about attention. If there are things in your life that are not joyful, you only need to pay attention to what is going on. Look to see what could be added, changed, or altered to bring joy.
For example, when I was younger, I loved doing fairly typical kid-type activities with my friends: playing baseball, playing video games, staying over for slumber parties and watching movies, swimming, and going to amusement parks. However, about the time I started high school, I pulled away from these activities. Also, I pulled away from my friends. Unsurprisingly, life became harder, less joyful. I became “serious.”
This seriousness served me in certain respects: I did well academically, and became an accomplished classical pianist. However, eventually, I realized that my seriousness wasn’t making me happy. I realized that the way out was to reconnect with what I enjoyed. I went through a phase of revisiting the types of childhood enthusiasms that made life fun, as if to help me re-learn how to enjoy myself. I went to baseball games (I was a huge SF Giants fan, and followed their campaigns with great passion), played childhood video games, watched the American movies I had so much enjoyed, and generally got re-acquainted with my playful, joyful nature.
Over the next many years, I stayed committed to finding my joyful place in every area of life. And though it hasn’t always been easy to do this, and though it hasn’t always happened instantly, the process has been enormously worthwhile. This blog is an acknowledgement of “my happiness obsession” that has guided me through my adult life.
The idea here is that you can look for what makes you happy. You can move towards it. You can eliminate what makes you unhappy. You can gradually and systematically improve your own experience to make Joy the centerpiece.
Think about a time when you were really happy. What were you doing? Who were you with? What were you feeling? Do you think that experience is just random? Is it possible that the joy you felt was an indication that you were aligned with the real you? Is it possible that, at your center, joy is who you are? After all, it’s fun to be joyful. It’s happy to be joyful. It’s the kind of thing you could just keep doing, and not ever look at the clock and not ever have to stop. Am I right?
When you live with joy, you live with purpose, power, and aplomb. It is inevitable, because you are living with alignment with your joyful nature. And because it is your true nature, it is a simple matter of getting in touch with that true nature. When you do, you will see how grand this thing called life can be.