Joy + Practice
“If thoughts are our inner senses, and if we allow our thoughts to be impoverished and pale, then the riches of our inner world can never come to meet us. We have to imagine more courageously if we are to greet creation more fully.”
Can I admit something a bit embarrassing to you?
Sometime in late 2019, my friend Shannon called to ask if I wanted to collaborate on a project together. After three years of metaphorically running on a treadmill while trying to shift career directions—a lot of creative effort without any visible forward progress—her ask felt like a personal breakthrough. A miracle, in fact. Finally, work that really lit me up.
In such a profound moment of excitement, things got a bit comical. Hanging up, I burst into a sprint around my home, arms waiving, tears forming, shouting unintelligibly.
That kind of joy.
Shortly after, I began doing this wonderful nonsense as part of my morning routine. I started practicing joy.
Each morning, right before I sit down to work, I put on headphones, turn on a song, look out at the sunrise through my living room window, think of something I deeply want, and begin celebrating like a wild woman—running around, crying, shouting—imagining it has just happened.
What inspired this silliness?
According to Benjamin Hardy, "Our cells are machine[s] for turning experience into biology." In Personality Isn't Permanent (take what works and leave the rest), he explains that our emotions actually turn into cellular DNA. We also become addicted to the hormonal triggers that happen in this process; we grow accustomed to stress or trauma or joy, directly related to our past and current experiences. Isn't that wild? It means emotions aren't just thoughts that happen in our head, but they become our physical body.
Given this, I see my strange little morning ritual as a way to train my cells to know what real, unencumbered joy feels like, and to become addicted to that. Beyond simply imagining it, I am literally trying to embody it. I'm working to make joy normal in my body. Common, even.
Indeed, just as adrienne marree brown calls science fiction "practicing the future together," I believe jumping up and down alone in my house every morning is one way I can practice my own future. In doing so, I believe I'll bring a more healed, more joyful, less triggered person into collective work, too.
