Day: February 5, 2025

“Don‘t let fear for tomorrow steal today’s joy.”

I said it first to myself, a chant to push back on the anxiety that always lurks in my mind. Then I said it out loud to others, in person, on the internet, because I hoped the thought could help others as well as me. Saying the words is only the beginning of course. Following through is always harder than intention. And it is difficult to not become a hypocrite when I stand in the middle of all of my things and none of them seem to have joy attached. This is what oppression, depression, and fatigue do to our brains. We can hold joy in our hands and it feels like gray dust. So I am learning to blow off the gray just and find the tiny shining nuggets to put into my pockets. It is a deliberate practice rescuing joy from fear. It requires me to remember that hope doesn’t always arrive as and emotional uplift which lightens all we carry. Sometimes hope is expressed as the next painful step in a long slog. Joy is not always shiny and eye catching, sometimes it is quite ordinary. Seeds are very ordinary, often ugly, but if tended they grow into something much bigger and more glorious. Here are the things I am doing to gather the seeds of joy and to give them space to grow.

• Daily thoughtful study for at least a few minutes at the beginning of my day. This includes scripture reading, prayer, and sampling from at least one other book that invites me to think big thoughts. Right now I’m bouncing between Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Repentence and Repair by Danya Rutenberg, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, and Phoenix Rising by James Goldberg.
• Putting writing at the beginning of my day. Giving myself the chance to work on Structuring Life to Support Creativity, or a blog post, or a private journal entry before the endless admin and demands of the day take over all my hours.
• My morning yoga practice is currently on hold while my injured shoulder heals, but I plan to return to it. These three morning things together sometimes take half an hour, other times an hour and a half. The days where I let them take longer tend to be calmer and more joyful.
• Regular service to my house and the people inside it. This most frequently means that I’m the one cleaning up the kitchen and dishes after four ADHD adults have once again created chaos while feeding themselves. Yes our house would benefit from better balance in who cleans up the mess, but this small act of creating order out of chaos makes the world around me visibly better, and that is a good thing.
• I watch for birds. The past few days I’ve been writing down the first bird I see each day. Writing it down gives “looking for birds” and importance that causes me to slow down and watch the world when I’m out in it.
• I’ve picked a few areas for my activism focus. Things I plan to pay attention to and spend energy on. My current focus is pushing back on book banning and anti-trans legislation in my home state of Utah. I am trusting that other people will take on the plethora of other things which also need to be defended against. Because I can’t to it all by myself and if I try, I will burn out.
• I avoid the news that wants to grab me with panic-inducing headlines. This includes when online friends are panic posting about whatever awful thing happened today and which is making them scared. I’ve selected a few news sources that are deliberate and researched. I check in on those in the afternoon sometime so that I am not oblivious. When there is news directly affecting my personal interests or my areas of activism, I may dig deeper and read entire articles. Mostly though, I’m scanning enough to have a sense of what is going on, then returning to the work of the day.
• When I take actions, I am not broadcasting them on the internet unless that broadcast serves in direct support of the action I’m taking.
• I keep my to do lists and get the tasks on them done so that my family has resources, so that my business continues, so that my customers are served, so that I’m honoring my freelance contracts. Doing the work of the day pushes back on despair. It is an assertion of hope that these tasks matter, that I’ll get to make more books in the future, that the world will continue.
• In the evenings Howard and I sit together and watch shows. On the surface this may look like a waste of time, hours in front of the TV. But it serves us. It occupies our minds while our bodies rest, which is particularly important for Howard with his long covid. It also rests our minds because it turns our thoughts away from work and from anxiety. We’re “commentary while watching” people, so the experience is interactive as we critique creative choices in writing, editing, or performance. We laugh together. And we settle into a calmer and more regulated state after the affairs of the day.
• While watching TV I do sudoku and embroidery kits. Both of these are simple activities which engage my brain and my hands. They have small moments of satisfaction when I complete a puzzle or when the stitches look pretty. Neither is in any way productive toward my career or income. They exist in my life as hobbies. If I stop enjoying them, I will abandon them for something else.
• By the end of February I will get to start looking for the first spring flowers.
• I should probably start going for walks in my neighborhood again.

Some of these things don’t feel much like joy when I am doing them. Lots of them feel like work. Right now I’m spending lots of energy just to keep anxiety from crushing me. Some nights anxiety stabs me with bursts of adrenaline and for a few minutes I feel like doom is imminent. That is when I turn on Anna Nalick’s Breathe 2am and remember how to hold still. Yet the combination of all of these things make space for joy to grow. They also move me toward the life I want to be living. Sometimes hope is persistence. Sometimes reaching for joy is sitting pouring water on dirt and trusting something will sprout soon.