“Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realizing of some Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.”
–Martha Beck
One word kept showing up over and over in life this past week: practice.
It started when I watched a short video of Ira Glass talking about creativity.
If you can’t watch the video, the gist of it is that whenever a person starts something, he or she is just *not* very good at it. He’s talking about writing, but his advice is truly applicable to most anything in life. And he’s absolutely right- that’s just the way *life* is, you know?
The bottom line is that we all have to start at the beginning. It takes time and lots of work to get really good at something. It takes practice.
I was so moved by that simple advice that I grabbed my journal and scribbled a couple of thoughts:
“What would happen if I spent a year of practicing things rather than actually doing them? What if I spent the next twelve months practicing creativity, practicing well-being, practicing creating a more joyful and fulfilling life? What would happen if I committed myself to practice rather than perfection and achievement?”
And then my friend Tracy over at PranaLight wrote a post about “practice” and the message was hammered home for me. I decided that this year I will practice joy.
But what does that mean? Practice has a few definitions, but there’s two that come to mind- practice as a regular routine, and practice as a way of training for something.
So what do I do already that feels like a regular “practice”? What are things I do daily without thinking about them or struggling with the process and the meaning behind them? What do I do that comes naturally to me, that I don’t overthink or stress too much about the tiny details?
The answers popped up immediately- swimming and gardening.
I’m a distance swimmer. I swim five miles a day, every day- rain, snow, sunshine, sickness and health. It’s just what I do, and I have been doing it now for half my life, since I was 19 years old.
I asked myself: what matters most about my swimming? Since I swim for distance and not for speed, I don’t care about how fast I swim at any given moment or if my body could produce less drag. What I care about is getting in that water every day, and swimming those five miles. I’m not trying to reach some goal, I’m just swimming every day.
It’s the same with gardening- while the details can be super fun (and maddening, too!), and it’s nice to look at a pretty garden, the bottom line is that I love the *process* of gardening. If I just wanted a beautiful garden to stroll in, I could hire a landscaper. But I love getting in there and getting my hands dirty and planting seeds and making things grow and spending the time in the sunshine and fresh air and see the beautiful colors and feeling nature under my hands and feet. *That’s* the joy of gardening for me- that possibility, that work, the time spent outside.
So what about joy, then? If my swimming practice and my gardening practice are about the whole picture, returning to them every day, than what about joy?
I think I have been too focused on the idea of joy as some tangible goal. I’ve been OVERTHINKING it. I jumped into the deep end of joy my first day out and expected too much, too soon. Where was my beginning with joy? Where is the practice?
And I have done the research about the neuroscience and psychology and joy. But a part of me still believes maybe if I just find the *right* way of approaching things, one morning I’ll wake up and joy will finally present herself to me, like sunshine on a spring day. Joy will finally open and I will embrace it and we will live happily ever after. But that’s not the way joy works.
So, I’m starting over, in a way. I’m going to practice joy.
And I’m going to start SMALL with joy. I’m going to start at the very beginning, like I did with swimming and gardening- one lap across the pool, one seed planted in a tiny pot. That’s it. One step at a time.
I will approach joy as I do my swimming or gardening. I will try to remember that joy needs to be cultivated and grown rather than discovered. I didn’t become a swimmer until I spent several months doing distance swims on a daily basis. I didn’t become a gardener until I spent several months working in the yard on a daily basis, and was committed and familiar with the process of keeping a garden.
I hope someday I am as confident in my ability to live joyfully as I am in my swimming and gardening. But for now I will start fresh- one opportunity for joy at a time, a return to the practice of joy every single day, in rain or shine, in sickness or health.