Have you ever come to a point in your life when you felt like...you'd run out of gas, that your joie de vivre is gone, and somewhere along the way you have lost sight of the passion and enthusiasm with which you began your JOURNEY into adulthood?
Is there a moment you can point to when life began to lose its oomph? When you stopped living and started surviving, enduring, pushing on...anyway?
I think that if we live along enough, everyone gets to a point in life when they may wonder what is the point. Or, may feel that we may never again experience that spark which energizes and makes one want to jump out of bed to greet the day.
Is JOY a natural casualty of getting older?
Over the next few months, I would like to embark on a journey of rediscovery. What is Joy? Why is it so easily felt when we are young? What are some very powerful ways in which we can reclaim it and bring that energy - the energy of Joy - back into our lives.
Will you share this journey with me?
For this week, I would like for you to look back, way back at the joy you felt as a child. Since children feel and experience things largely uncensored by societal constraints, emotion can be boldly felt and followed. Later on, we learn to mute our feelings and even to bury our instincts and intuitions, but young children are free from all of that for a time.
One of my earliest joyful moments was when I was about three years old. One Sunday afternoon, my family of four had piled into our black Plymouth Station Wagon to go on our usual "Sunday Drive" through the back roads of Virginia. Somewhere along the way, our car became stuck in mud; I guess it had been raining. But now the sun was out and we were stuck! We piled out of the car and Mama did her best to keep my older sister and I out of the mud in our Sunday clothes, but along the roadside in that mud were what looked like hundreds of little blue butterflies, hundreds! They were everywhere, and my sister and I were in a fever to catch one. We darted about here, there and everywhere, trying to catch these butterflies, completely disregarding Mama's admonitions to "Stay out of the MUD!" Our shoes were a mess when it was all over. Do you know why I remember this experience so well, though it was very long ago?
JOY.
My sister and I felt pure, unadulterated JOY in that moment (unfortunately, I know that Mama did not!). :)
Look back into your early childhood to some of your earliest memories. Where did you feel joy? What were you doing? Whom were you with?
Share these in Comments, if you like, or write them in a journal. But think about them and hold them in your heart until we meet back here again next Tuesday!
Have a lovely day!
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