Practicing Joy

One day shortly after I got into birdwatching, I called my dad and rapturously told him about this walk I took by the river, and the throngs of cliff swallows I had seen swooping in and out of spherical mud nests they’d built under the bridges. There were dozens of them, white bellies gleaming in the golden hour sun, diving over the water to catch bugs, returning with their findings to their hatchlings, poking heads out the nest opening to look for their next mark, and then repeating.

“I’ve never seen anything like it” I raved.

“What do you mean?” My dad said, a little confused. “We walked those same river trails all the time when you were a kid. You saw it every spring.”

But I hadn’t.

When I look back on most of my pre-birding life, I see such a blurry experience of the world. Like, I must have been surrounded by the same birdsong everywhere I went, just as I am today, but I can’t remember ever hearing it. I know the same Hawks and Kingbirds that I now spot while running errands didn’t just start existing a few years ago, but for all intents and purposes, I was living on a Kingbird-free planet. The silhouetted splotches in the sky were barely worth my notice, much less the unabashed joy they now elicit.

I know I’m not unique in that. Most of us have lived lives that trained our brains to notice pain and gloss over beauty. Leading to lives that not only look blurry but also seem, like, bad.

Our trauma has honed our ability to pick up on things to dislike about ourselves, and our eyes have been trained toward mess and stuckness. Neuroscience tells us that our brains are more likely to notice what they already expect to exist. So for those of us who spent our lives bracing against letdowns and shoes dropping, being trained to scan for what could go wrong instead of looking out for what might already be right, our minds are woefully out of practice in seeing beauty.

Because of that, the annoying stressy painful stuff feels like all that exists, feels insurmountable and omnipresent.

But that being what we’ve learned to see doesn’t keep other things from existing. Just like the birds that sang over my ignorant, dissociated head my whole life, there is more to our experience than we know how to notice.

The world is more beautiful than we’ve ever been allowed to believe.

To be clear: Your triggers, hardships, and setbacks are real. They deserve processing and grieving, they impact your life in important ways. This is true.

and.

Woven within and throughout those exact same dark spots you’re so familiar with, there is so much light.

There is beauty that you’ve been walking past without a single glance, every day. There are lovable, admirable things about you that have been going unnoticed (or discounted as unimportant) your whole life.

These things are also real and deserve to be a felt part of your life experience.

If they were part of the story you tell yourself about what the world looks like, how differently might you feel about yourself, about your life?

Learning to notice and appreciate what is good will shift your quality of life drastically - not by ignoring the hard shit, just by making sure that hard shit isn’t the only character that gets to have a voice.

We owe it to ourselves to tell a full, honest, and balanced story. To ensure that the fear we’ve learned to be hypervigilant towards and the ennui we’ve come to expect aren’t monologuing uninterrupted, but are having dialogue with the signs of safety and beauty that can ground and assist them.

You start tuning into the full spectrum of life and suddenly, your mistake at work doesn’t feel so crushing, because that error exists alongside your knowledge of all the times you’ve succeeded and helped.

Your commute becomes an opportunity for adventure, discovery, and wonder, instead of an obligatory trudge into a full day of more obligatory trudging.

Headlines about how dire the state of the world is are processed in the context of how much good exists in the state of the world, too. How much is worth fighting for, how many reasons there are to hope. This doesn’t make the world not scary, but it does help us have the resilience we need to keep going.

But that shift isn’t just going to happen because you want it to or know it’s important. If that were the case, every one of us who’s ever pinned a Mary Oliver quote on Pinterest or liked a TikTok about romanticizing our life would have gotten there already.

To experience the benefits of basking in life’s fullness we need to:

1. Understand how beauty, joy, and safety actually look and feel (which will be different for each of us) so that we can recognize them when they show up.

2. Cultivate a sustainable, actionable habit of gathering evidence. Practice the art of noticing.

3. Make space to feel the impacts of that habit! Notice how it fills us with inspiration and resilience, so we can see how useful it truly is and source the motivation for our next stretch of trying.

Tuning into delight is a learned skill that needs practice.

Here is your chance to practice.

Starting on the Summer Solstice, my friend

Giselle Buchanan

and I will be leading a weeklong virtual scavenger hunt to help us practice the art of noticing and fall in love with life.

2 virtual workshops on wonder and creativity, along with 7 days of emails full of prompts and exercises to help you practice love-fueled engagement with the world around you, as you notice what already is.

The joy we source in this process is not a product of trying to fix ourselves or change our lives. The joy we source in this process is the joy that was happening all around us the whole time, waiting for us to let it in.

If you are aware that your beauty-seeing muscle is out of practice, if you’re craving a reason to get outside, if you’re hoping to have a captivated summer full of sunsets and deep breaths, we’d love for you to come practice with us.