noticing joy

Confession. I didn’t love Inside Out like everyone else did. I found it depressing. The truth was, it hit too close to home.

Sifting through my memories for something that was pure joy—with no sadness or fear or guilt tainting it—left me empty. It wasn’t like I’d never been happy. Of course I had. But then I was just waiting for something bad to happen to mess it all up. And because I am alive, eventually something bad would happen.

I made a lot of changes last year, but one of the big ones wasn’t something I planned.

I started reading The Wind in the Willows with my kids. There were moments reading that book that were pure joy. Especially when my son couldn’t stop laughing.

My kids eventually rejected it for being too kiddish, and I put it aside. But I recently picked it up again, and I’m slowly making my way through it, savoring the delight and silliness (and sometimes just plain weirdness).

Because that book taught me to notice joy. I had felt joy before, but I hadn’t paid attention. So I didn’t know to stop and smile and feel it thoroughly when it showed up.

It took laughing at Rat falling back in his boat as he waxed poetic about the wonders of the river—and then laughing at himself—to make me laugh at myself.

I’m still prone to getting too serious, but I can feel it now.

And when the weight of things gets too much, I look around. I see my daughter’s watercolors on the wall, sharp colored pencils, The Jewish Annotated New Testament I’ve been wanting for years and I finally found a cheap used copy and it just arrived today, a pink cup that reminds me of one K had that said, “Are you kitten me right meow?” and her face as she read it for the first time, the joke dawning slowly, and then her saying, “Oh, that’s funny!”, jars of flour and cornstarch and pure white powdered sugar, a lily I’ve somehow managed to keep alive (although it isn’t blooming) that was a gift of thanks that reminds me of my wonderful students at the Latino Community Association, which reminds me of the pupusas Glenda makes and the crunch of fermented cabbage that goes with it and tastes like nothing you’ve ever had before, the cans that we got at Hopscotch and jumping on a light trampoline and throwing balls at my kids in a light pit, and the picture of the four of us at Multnomah Falls before K started sticking her tongue out in every picture, and piles of notebooks that signify all the learning going on, and my planner that makes me ridiculously happy for no reason, and my turquoise butter dish with the bird on top, which is one of my favorite things, and it reminds me of my wonderful husband who insisted I order another one when the first one got broken, the sign R got me for Christmas that says “Love Blooms Here” because he knew I would like it, the cool picnic basket on top of the fridge with a special plate in the bottom so you can put a pie underneath that my mother-in-law got at a charity auction because she remembered me saying I wanted a picnic basket, which takes me on all the picnics we’ve had together, including the one two springs ago after months of hard times, when it was just K and R and I, and we took school to the park, and I may have even been reading The Wind in the Willows to the kids as they spun on the merry-go-round—no, it was too early for that, but it was something equally delightful, and the whole day was magical.

There’s joy all around me. I just have to notice it.