This year, I’m thankful for joy.
At the end of 2016, I read The Happiness Project for our January book club. It was at the end of a very frustrating, difficult, and transformative year. I had decided years before that having more than one goal for the year was setting myself up for failure, so I had been choosing one over-arching goal each year for several years. For 2016, I had chosen to “pray every day to know how to show Christ-like love for others.”
Boy, did I get schooled! In case you’re wondering, learning to love others with Christ-like love requires becoming humble. Learning humility is, well, humbling. Hard. At times, painful. Christ lowered himself to the depth of humility to suffer through everything we suffered, and that is how he can show perfect empathy. And I wanted to do that?!
So, when I read The Happiness Project, I was inspired to find more joy in my life, to really tease out what makes me happy and do more of it. I was exhausted from the loving without replenishing my stores. No more of this constant struggling to find purpose and meaning in my life. No more just getting through each day. I distilled it to five categories of things that make me happy: my relationship with Adam, having a clean and peaceful atmosphere in my home, feeling healthy, feeling accomplished/needed, and spending time with friends. So I set goals in each of these areas. I made charts to check each of these things off for every single day of the year. And I made a list of “Rachel’s Rules of Adulthood,” really a set of mantras to repeat when I found myself stuck in unproductive or negative thinking. It’s not quite the end of 2017, but in the spirit of Thanksgiving I’d like to reflect on how much this has changed my life.
I’m not going to even touch on the category of my health. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t perfect in my goals in that area (or any area), but I made a strong effort with very little result. That’s mostly out of my hands, so I will leave that for another day, another year.
I struggled with my goals to strengthen and honor my relationship with Adam, but I definitely saw growth. The more energy I put into it, the more he seemed to give. He knew that was on my to-do list, and he made an effort to help me accomplish it. Between our efforts there was more intimacy and a greater sense of strength in our marriage.
Having a clean and peaceful atmosphere in my home was also very difficult. It’s not for no reason that keeping my house orderly had taken the back burner. Slowly, I made an effort to organize areas of my home that were in overwhelming chaos. It’s not perfect, there are still things I’d like to accomplish, but I am feeling more peace and less stress when I’m at home.
Spending time with friends and building better friend relationships took on a completely different meaning than I ever expected. I set goals to spend time with specific people, and it turned out that I needed interactions of a different sort in the end. The friendships I have cultivated are still new, but deeper than I had imagined. I find purpose and meaning in my interactions, and a level of understanding and empathy that surpasses what I have previously found in other relationships.
The area that has changed the most for me is in my efforts to expand on my accomplishments and feelings of being needed and useful. It happened almost subconsciously, which sounds ridiculous considering I had a daily checklist, but it really seemed to happen because of my mental shift and not because I was consciously “checking” things off my list. I started to think of myself as a person who had valuable skills and abilities, and to be less afraid of taking risks. And once I got started, I just didn’t seem to stop. In the past, I would have felt overwhelmed by tasks that felt foreign or to which I was unaccustomed, but with a new set of mantras, I was able to continue taking another step forward, and another, and another.
The most noticeable and measureable change in my life has been going back to work. It really has given me confidence and newfound purpose in my days. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t set the goal to “practice a skill.” I tried for a couple of months to convince myself to take on different skills that I thought were in the direction I wanted to go, but fairly quickly I fell into the habit of writing “teaching” in the blank space I had left underneath “practice a skill.” It only took me until March or April to realize that was where I was meant to be all along.
Under the same category of accomplishments and being needed falls my church responsibilities and praying to lift others. The shift in importance from the former to the latter has been slow, but looking back, monumental. I have found a similar to, but deeper, fulfillment in answering the “promptings” or nudges to be a loving presence and voice in people’s lives as I have had in serving in church callings. Because I had the opportunity to expand the circle of people I was interacting with, it has felt even more urgent and necessary than serving those who have have the support system of the church.
I also have found so much peace and joy in checking nagging to-dos off my constant to-do list. Going to the first items I have listed there (ones that have sat there for months) and finally accomplishing them is so empowering, I highly recommend it!
A huge part of me wants to go back and carefully polish my thoughts, but I think I’m going to leave it as it is, a quick brain vomit so that I can remember exactly how it came to my mind. So there it is.
This year, I’m thankful for joy.
