Edel Coffey: The importance of finding joy in our daily lives

Edel Coffey: the key to joy in life is in its little details. Photo: Ray Ryan

I was talking to a fitness expert recently, trying to figure out a way to introduce exercise into my life in a more permanent and ongoing way rather than the stop-start-stop way that has been the habit of my lifetime. “Every time I hit a goal, I stop. And then I have to start again six months later,” I complained. “How can I sustain?” She looked at me serenely and said, “I think we greatly underestimate joy in our lives.”

It was such a simple concept but I felt like I had just been given the secret to life. Joy. Find joy. Do things you enjoy. It was so simple. The reason I stop going to the gym when I hit a fitness goal is because I don’t like going to the gym. I find it … punishing. But if I were to do something I enjoyed, I might persist with it.

The conversation got me thinking about joy in general and how we can let more moments of it into our lives. If I look inside myself for sheer, uncomplicated joy, I find instead a complex knot of feelings. I would have made a great puritan because I am naturally self-loathing, self-flagellating, and self-doubting – I am good at all the ‘selfs’! I think I have actually built up defences against joy in a society that teaches us to deny and punish ourselves. 

A lot of the time I operate like a little mole, head down, digging in the dark, not expecting to find joy and so not looking up from my digging. There’s work to be done, things to be ticked off the list, places to be. Looking up might slow me down, distract me. But I’m thinking now, if I allowed myself to look up, what might I see? How much more pleasurable might my digging be? And if the digging was more pleasurable would I actually be better at it, quicker, more efficient?

Finding joy in small moments is truly one of the greatest gifts in life. Even though joyful moments are by nature small and fleeting they somehow have the power to make us feel truly alive. And joy is nearly always free. A shaft of sunlight that breaks through the clouds and makes everything look beautiful and sparkling just as your favourite song comes on the radio through your headphones making your life feel like a French movie for just that moment before the sun retreats and the song finishes and you must get back to work.

A smile from a stranger reminds you are not invisible after all. The way the sea can sometimes look like one giant membranous body and not individual atoms of water. A quote from Walt Disney – “if you can dream it you can be it” - printed on the cuff of a man’s shirt. Washing my daughters’ hair in the bath while Mozart’s lullabies play on my phone and everyone and everything is momentarily harmonious.

Finding joy is easy, if you’re looking for it. The Japanese decluttering guru, Marie Kondo’s philosophy centres around her now-famous question ‘does it spark joy?’ She uses the question to help people decide whether they should get rid of excess belongings or not. But it could be applied to our lives in general too. We may not be able to get rid of the things that don’t spark joy in our lives as easily as throwing away an old pair of jeans or a broken ornament. 

We might be in difficult situations or circumstances that we can’t quickly change or see an immediate way out of but we can look out for the things that spark joy and rebalance the scales of our days by letting the joyful moments add up and gain weight.

I concede it can be hard enough to think about finding the moments of joy in your life when prices keep going up, and cortisol is burning through your system and your pleasure centres have shut down because you need that energy to work your two jobs.

I’m aware that in a world of rising energy costs, rising homelessness numbers, rising costs of living, finding joy in the small moments might feel like a luxury and a privilege.

But that’s exactly the time when we need joy the most. Moments of joy don’t magically make the worry, the stress, the bills, or whatever disappear, but they do bring moments of relief.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought joy really is one of the few things we have control over in our lives, in that we can switch ourselves on to joy, we can make the decision to look up from our digging and it doesn’t cost us a thing.

We can work our whole lives trying to get ahead in our careers, trying to achieve financial independence, caring for others, and most of us do just that, but from moment to moment, joy is what will get us through the day. If we can’t change our situations for now, finding joy in the small moments is still worthwhile.

It might not change our circumstances, but it will surely change our lives.