JOY: My 2020 Motto & Reflection

My motto this year was to “Choose joy.” It’s a simple concept but hard to actually do sometimes. I had a reading done at the beginning of the year and the advice that I received was to treat 2020 like a year of Christimases. My task: Wake up everyday and feel joy, excitement and anticipation. Expect and notice the gifts I’m given.

The tricky part for me is that I feel guilty for feeling joy when others are suffering and guess what….this year there was a pandemic!! What a challenging time to try and feel joy everyday. I also sometimes feel afraid to feel joy fully because I’m afraid that something bad will happen to take that joy away, and the events of this year heightened that fear. I never knew if everyone I loved was safe. I never knew what was going to happen. I really built up my trust muscle this year.

Through it all, I became more aware of how much I have a choice in how I feel. It’s all up to me ultimately! I’ve always heard that it’s our choice whether we feel good or bad, but I kind of just heard it and that was that. This practice really showed me how much I was unconsciously choosing and helped me become more active in consciously choosing what I want to feel. I became more aware of when I was making the choice to not feel good and why. Observing and paying attention to this gave me the awareness I needed so that I could consciously choose in every moment.

When people chose to complain, I could choose to complain or choose to do something else. When something went wrong, I could choose to have it ruin my day or choose to view it in a different way. I could choose to feel bad because someone else felt bad, or I could choose to use the energy I had from feeling good to do something constructive and impactful and hopefully uplift others in the process.

I am not a joy expert but omg I really hope I am one day. This is a work in progress, but even still I feel like I’m living with more intention and agency. On days when I felt absolutely horrible, it was the stories and videos and people that exemplified joy that made me feel better. So I’m going to carry that with me to remind myself how important it is to give into joy. The world needs it.

xo