Posted on : By : Michelle Posted in : Uncategorized

My Theme(s) for 2023

I’ve been choosing a word of the year since 2020. My words so far have been Create (2020), Tend (2021), and Joy (2022). The idea behind choosing a theme is to focus your attention on one area of your life you would like to change or enhance in some way. So, if someone wanted to improve their fitness they might choose the word Strength. There are many, many articles online regarding the practice of choosing a yearly theme. I was introduced to the concept through a podcast I enjoy, Happier with Gretchen Rubin. 

I have spent the last couple of weeks in a period of discernment, looking back on my 2022 and imagining how I want my 2023 to look and feel.

2022 felt like a very scattered year –  like I had a lot of good intentions and not enough follow through. I don’t think I sent out one birthday card to friends and family. No Christmas cards. I fell down on my correspondence with dear friends. 

I’m very hard on myself, so it’s very easy to pick out the places where I fell down in 2022. I did struggle with time seeming to fly by (oops, I missed that birthday; oops I missed the best time to photograph the herons nesting; oops, I’m late in renewing the registration for my car) and with life seeming to be more something that happened to me rather than something I made happen. 

Of course, many aspects of life are not ours to plan or choose. They do just happen. Catastrophic weather. Health problems large and small. Getting older. The decisions/moods/happiness of other people. Some of these things we realize we have no control over. Others we (I) somehow tend to think we can influence to a greater extent than is realistic. I know that part of the work I still need to do within myself is to be better at categorizing things into what I can control and what I cannot control.

Which brings me to my word(s) for 2023 – working on some of the things that are under my control.

In 2023 I want to make my life feel more intentional. When I think back on 2022 it’s like I was driving a car and only looking at the road directly in front of the car, not seeing the road work or the slow-down a mile ahead. I was reacting more than acting. As you can imagine, this can and did lead to a lot of unnecessary stress. 

I picked four words for 2023 instead of one. My words are: FOCUS, ORDER, SERENITY, and JOY. 

Focus and Order will inspire and remind me to be more strategic in my life. To plan, to record that plan, to refer to the plan often, and to carry out the plan in a calm manner. I will be using an old-fashioned paper-and-pen planner into which I will faithfully record doctor’s appointments, birthdays, oil changes, registration renewals. The one I have chosen (this one from Amazon) starts with a broad overview of the year and then drills down to the nitty gritty day to day. I’ve used paper-and-pen planners before and they have worked well for me, so I am realistically optimistic that this tool will help me this year.

Serenity, my third word, is hopefully a state of mind I will reach by keeping all of the minutiae of my life under control. It will also remind me of the Serenity Prayer, which states, “God, grant me the serenity to accept  the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That wisdom to know the difference, man. That is the hard one.

I’m keeping Joy as one of my themes for this year. I loved having it as my theme last year, and I want to keep the notion of being joyful at the forefront. A dear friend of mine focused on Joy as well, and she would send me texts telling me what brought her joy on any given day (not every day, but on a regular basis). I derived so much joy just seeing what brought her joy. 

Speaking of joy – today I went for a walk in the Cuyahoga National Forest with Sam and Pokey. We saw two herons, one of which was so close and so unconcerned with our presence that I was able to get some pretty nice photos. Even Pokey’s barking didn’t scare it away. Those moments of being in the presence of such beautiful creatures in such close proximity absolutely filled me with joy. 

Happy New Year, everyone. My next post will be my “23 for 2023” – 23 things I plan to experience during this year. 

Love,

Michelle xoxo

Posted on : By : Michelle Posted in : Uncategorized

Joy

I’ve been spending the past few weeks thinking about my 2022 theme of “Joy” – and what it is I mean when I speak of Joy and bringing more of it into my life.

Joy and happiness are related feelings, but when I talk about bringing more joy into my life, I’m not talking about happiness.

I don’t live in a constant state of happiness, and I don’t aspire to live in a constant state of happiness. The nature of life is too complicated for that to ever be possible (and I suspect constant happiness would get boring after a while). I’m a fairly content person, but I definitely have my moments of feeling sad, anxious, annoyed, stressed, or just flat. We are in the middle of our 2 1/2 months-long busy time at work right now and I am logging 9-10 hours each day sitting at my dining room table and sometimes I just want to let loose with a primal scream. We are still in the midst of a pandemic. I am grandmother to a puppy who is about 65% pure cuteness and 35% utter chaos. And by all measures the world is pretty screwed up (as it always has been). 

Joy, to me, is that sudden buoyancy of spirit that you feel when you encounter something delightful, or awe-inspiring, or hilarious, or beautiful. Your day can be quite dull, or worse, and along comes some unexpected (or planned) thing that lifts you completely out of your circumstances, if only for a moment. And the wonderful part is that even the memory of that experience has the power to bring you joy. Which is why I want to create a Joy Journal – to list all of the things that have brought joy into my life. And to revisit them when I need a little boost.

Joy can be brought on by small things (blue skies and sun after several cloudy days) or life changing things (the birth of your child). The thing I love about joy is that you can experience it even in the darkest times of your life. I remember many years ago I was in a very sad and difficult time in my life. It was late at night and I was awake, sitting in my living room, thoughts racing. I happened to look out the window, at my snowy front yard, and a buck with an enormous rack slowly walked along and stopped right in front of my window. I felt such awe and gratitude for the experience of seeing such beauty. Seeing the buck didn’t change the circumstances of my life, but for that one moment it brought me to a better place. I’m still grateful to that buck for stopping by. 

Some things that have brought me joy lately:

  • We have had a couple feet of snow on the ground here since Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I dug a path and a track for Pokey in our back yard. It cracks me up every time I see him racing around the track. He loves it so much. It reminds me of when I used to create elaborate mazes for Sam with sidewalk chalk on our driveway.
  • The other morning I was walking Pokey down our street and we heard a strange animal call – Pokey actually looked up at me as if to say, “What the heck?” It turned out to be a huge pileated woodpecker. I hardly ever see them around here, and this one zigzagged from one side of the street to the other for a while before heading to parts unknown. 
  • Watching the potted tulips on my kitchen counter grow and bloom out. 
  • Watching videos of Peter Gabriel’s 1994 Secret World Tour (especially Solsbury Hill and In Your Eyes)
  • Sara Bareilles singing Many the Miles on a houseboat (especially when she forgets the lyrics and just goes with the flow)
  • Pokey sleeping in my lap
  • Snowy hikes in local parks
  • Laughing at something silly with my mom during a phone call
  • Seeing my friend Beth’s smiling face when our weekly Zoom call connects
  • Sunny days and the sun on my face 
  • Finishing a blog post after a dry spell 🙂

See you soon, friends!

Love,

Michelle xoxo

Posted on : By : Michelle Posted in : Uncategorized

Joyful

I’m very interested in the subjects of happiness and joy, and how to get more of both in my life. As I have gotten older, the meaning of the word “happiness” has shifted, from some state of perfection (I’ll be happier when I’m thinner, have more money in the bank, a different job, etc) to a sense of contentment with what “is.” To me, happiness is completely dependent on my attitude toward whatever is going on in my life. Certainly, there are some events in people’s lives that can stretch this to the breaking point, but on average most lives are pretty even-keeled and, dare I say, mundane most of the time. It’s finding the contentment in the mundane that interests me most, and my practice of gratitude goes a long way toward helping me find that contentment.

Joy, in my experience, is something completely different than happiness, but it can contribute toward happiness.

When I think of joy, I think of being suffused by positive feelings as a response to something very particular. Joy can come on suddenly – imagine the feeling of seeing a mother deer and her fawn crossing your back lawn – but the positive vibrations of that moment can continue long beyond the moment. Watching a beautiful sunrise, for example, can create a buzz within that keeps you smiling throughout the day.

I’m really enjoying a book right now that is all about joy.  It’s called, “Joy: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness” and it’s written by Ingrid Fetell Lee. The author sets out to answer the question, “How do tangible things create an intangible feeling of joy?” She combines anecdotal evidence with scientific studies to try to identify what it is about certain things that activate joy within us.

There are ten chapters in the book, each identifying a quality of objects or experiences that tend to generate the feeling of joy. I won’t list them all here.  I’m only a few chapters into the book, but what Lee says resonates with me. In Chapter One she discusses the power of bright color to bring joy. Think rainbows, sunrises, sunsets, flowers, hummingbirds! I definitely have felt the power of color in my life. Recently, in an effort to make my meals more intentional (as opposed to eating lunch while working on an Excel file on my work computer), I bought a few colorful placemats and cloth napkins in the bright patterns associated with the Provence region in France. Each time I sit down for breakfast and lunch these days, the colors make me feel good. Joyful. The meal itself becomes more satisfying.

As I was thinking about color and joy this weekend, I looked around to other colorful things in my life that bring me joy:

  • Potted flowering spring bulbs bought at the grocery store on Thursday. 
  • My collection of bright scarves, which bring a sense of joy that my neutral colored tops and trousers could never hope to generate. 
  • Fruit! 
  • My new placemats and cloth napkins
  • An orange tea towel bought from the same vendor as  the placemats and napkins. 
  • Our coffee and tea caddies, with their colorful varieties of teas and coffee pods. 
  • My favorite pottery pieces (which I use more often now that I’m paying more attention to the aesthetics of my meals). 

What colorful things bring you joy? 

Love, 

Michelle xoxo

PS – This is my 100th blog post. Can you believe it?