As I was journaling yesterday morning, I realized a distinction that’s become interesting to me. I noticed that, for me, there are two kinds of Joy. Real-time and in-retrospect.

Real-time joy is joy I am feeling in that very moment. I feel this when I am hugging my kids or we’re all laughing out loud. When I am making art. When I am driving and a song I love is turned up loud and it’s sunny outside so I have the windows down. This kind of joy comes from a happy experience combined with presence and the feeling of aliveness. The feeling of being in this very moment, feeling grateful, and really just soaking it in.

In-retrospect joy comes in cases where I am not always enjoying the moment while it’s happening but the memories of it bring me a lot of joy. This can happen on vacation sometimes. With little kids and a lot of moving parts, vacations can sometimes we hectic in the moment. But then I come home and I look at our photos and relive the moments and I am swept with huge, deep joy.

This also happens with my projects sometimes. There are weeks when working on the Savor Project isn’t maybe super-joyful in the moment (or even the art is like that sometimes) but it’s always always joyful when I sit down with the album. Deep, satisfying joy.

I think both of them are valuable and add to my life in different ways. The in-retrospect joy helps develop delayed gratification which is an important skill to have in life. It also allows me to tap into joy in moments where I might not be feeling it. I can grab my Savor Project, spend some fifteen minutes and I am guaranteed to feel the rush of joy.

The real-time joy gives meaning and light into my days. If I had no real-time joy, I think life would be a lot harder to get through. With a four-year-old, however, there is plenty of real-time joy, thankfully. Having said that, when he’s not around, I am not always good at this one. And, as I was journaling, I was thinking that what would be good is to have a balance between the two. So that each week (and even each day) is full of both: things that make me joyful right now and things I do because I know they will make me joyful later.

Part of this is knowing what those things are. Identifying them, noticing them. So for the next week or two, I’ll be keeping track of the moments of joy and making a list so that I can then infuse them into my weeks deliberately. As much as I believe in serendipity and being in the moment, I also believe there’s something to be said for life by design (another post for another time) so this is how I start to design mine to be full of joy.

PS: I have a blog post up on the big picture classes blog today. You can read it here.

Last week had some rough moments for me. I went through a few days where I struggled so much that I had those times where the world just looks dimmer. It doesn’t even matter what started it and what added on top, what matters is that I found myself sinking and the hole was narrow and deep.

When I find myself in one of those, it requires a lot of clawing to get out. It seems easier to give up and just sit there. Easier to just cry, yell, or unleash it on others in some way. But, of course, that doesn’t get me out of the hole and I do more damage, and continue to look at the world with the glasses that block out the joy.

This morning, as I was journaling around 5:45am, I made a decision about the next three months. I gave myself the challenge that each time anything upset me, angered me, frustrated me, or even remotely irritated me, I have to immediately stop and think of something I am truly grateful for. Not one of those general “I love my kids” or extreme “isn’t it good to have arms and legs” ones. (Not that those aren’t amazing and important but I wanted to make sure I got specific, detailed and not hand-wavy to ensure I was taking it seriously.) I have to think of a specific thing I am grateful for in that very moment that makes my life magical. That’s special and wonderful about my life. Every single time.

This is not as much to replace the “bad” thoughts as it is to balance things out. I think that I have a tendency to assume “everything is terrible!” when I get in a downward spiral. The plan is that these moments I have to take to acknowledge the good will keep me and this potential spiral in check.

I already do a daily gratitude practice but I’ve come to think of this as gratitude on steroids. Gratitude with more in-the-moment presence.

I don’t know if it will work but I am going to focus on it consistently and try to make a practice of it and let’s see what comes of it. If you’ve ever tried anything like this, I’d love to hear how it went for you.

On Monday mornings my son’s school has an assembly called chapel. The kids all sit on the floor in groups and the parents who choose to show up, sit toward the back of the room. One of the things they do in each chapel is have class reporters come up for each class, first through fifth. One student from each section shares something they did at school that week. The fifth graders do a slideshow on a topic of their choosing.

What struck me this time was the huge change from first grade to third grade to fifth grade. In a matter of four years, these kids go from barely being able to read and write to expressing their thoughts eloquently, putting together a coherent presentation, and adding their own unique voice into their project. The difference between first grade and third is wide and deep and the amount of growth and learning from first grade to fifth is mind blowing.

All in four years.

This got me thinking about my life and growth and learning. I know that we spend the years between six and twenty-one in school and our full-time job during that time is to learn as much as possible, so it makes sense that most of our learning takes place during that period of our lives. But does it really have to stagnate so much after we leave school?

I love learning. While I have my favorites (like languages, art, math, literature, statistics, and psychology) I am always happy to learn anything at all. It’s rare to find a class I wouldn’t love to take. And if you’ve been around here for a long while, you know that I take a lot of online classes. But, sitting in that chapel made me realize that the growth rate I’ve had in the last four (or ten really) years is much lower than I’d like.

More importantly, it made me realize how much we are capable of growing in a short amount of time.

It made me wonder why this is something that degrades over time. Is it just because of time limits? Is it because we don’t go to school anymore so we don’t have to work so hard at it? Is it that our brains are not capable of such acute growth anymore? (I know they used to think that, but I also know they’ve proven that our brain grows and learns and adapts our whole lives.) Is it that we stop believing we can and just stop trying? Is it that there’s too much going on? Is it that we just don’t care?

I am not sure what the answer is. I don’t even know what it is, for me. I spent a lot of time learning when I was in my twenties. I took a ton of college courses locally in NYC just for fun. When I lived in Japan, I took daily Japanese classes and when I returned to NYC, I continued them as well as Italian and Psychology, Sign Language, Literature classes and many more. But when we moved to the West Coast, I stopped. I think it’s partly due to the lack of freedom I feel because I can’t drive around as easily as I’d like and partly due to the more hectic life I lead as my family of two became a family of four.

As I sat in that room, I realized how much I missed learning and growing.

(In honesty, another part of my life that I dropped around the same time is volunteering and I miss that dearly, too.)

I know my kids are still a little too young and that as they grow up, some of the liberties I had will come back but I noticed that, like most things, these muscles need regular attention or they atrophy. Since I’ve begun working from home, I’ve become less socially comfortable and taking a class online seems so much easier now than physically going to one. But I know that it’s less enjoyable in many ways (while more practical in others).

I’m not sure what my point is with this post except maybe to share some of my thoughts from Monday morning and the realization that we humans are capable of mind-blowing growth and progress in a short amount of time. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that. I don’t ever want to think it’s too late.

So the big question now is what’s next? I am one year away from forty and I’d really like to make this last year of my 30s count.

How do I bring on some mind-blowing growth?