The Recipe for Joy

Do you want more joy in your life?

One of the ways to know more joy is to take a moment and realize that in this messy, beautiful, astounding and heartbreaking thing called life, we are all in this together, living on a tiny jewel of a planet that is dancing through vast oceans of space. And we have much more in common than we do differences. There is no them.  There is only us.

Other people may have a different color of skin, or gender or heritage, or religion or nationality or sexuality than you do. But what we all have in common is that each one of us is a mixture of dark and light and we all have dreams and despairs, joys and fears, along with good times and painful times and we all want to be happy.

To remember that we are all family allows you to live from your heart. I just got back from seeing my doctor and I had wonderful conversations with people in the elevator, standing in line to check in, the doctor and his assistant, and another man in the elevator back to my car who was in a lot of pain. How you connect with people on a daily basis matters, not only to them but it changes your life.  I was smiling and all these people were smiling as we parted ways.

Meeting your neighbor as yourself is so beautifully expressed in the story of a young woman who was at the end of her rope.  She had broken up from a long and very painful relationship and had moved to a new city—without friends, without vision and without hope. Every day she would come home from work and just stare at the walls, sometimes crying, but mostly just sitting and wondering if she would ever know joy again.

One night, upon returning from work, much to her amazement, the red light of her answering machine was flashing. When she played the message, it was a wonderful male voice apologizing for calling the wrong number.  He said that her voice on the message sounded so sad, and he just wanted to tell her that it was okay to be sad, that to be able to feel that sadness was important.  His message went on for almost twenty minutes, talking about going through pain instead of running away from it and how even though it probably seemed impossible now, things would get better.  Even though she never learned who the person was, this message was a healing catalyst in her life.

Know you can truly make a difference in the healing of our planet simply by how you meet people you may have formerly called strangers. Look for places where you can bring kindness into the world, we all share. Even just a smile can make a hug difference in somebody’s day.

Be the healing catalyst that our struggling world so deeply needs.