Creating Joy

BULLSEYE BLOG

With an assassination of a general, trade wars, headlines of cybersecurity breaches, sex-trafficking, coronavirus, and ransom hacking affecting my life directly. It is true, we could die tomorrow … It was easy to spiral down into negative thinking. And while I usually don’t go down that path too far or for too long, this time, I forgot myself. That is not what I’m here for. It’s time to spread some joy!

When I was in my teens, (just five or so years ago, ;),

My brother, Robert, sister, Janie, and I were caravan-ing with Mom and Dad. We were in the front car. Mom and Dad were in the back car. Somewhere along the way we decided we were going to wave at every car that passed us by. So we did! We would wave and smile really big, and the people in the cars would wave back and then turned back to look at us as if ,

“Wow, do I know that person?”

We would look in the rearview mirror to see what mom and dad would do. Mom and Dad would wave at these new friendly people because they had waved at us, only as they passed us, and so it seemed like they were waving at them! They would look and smile as they waved and then at each other. “Were we supposed to know them?” At this point I’m about to pee in my pants from laughing so hard. We all are! It took a good 15 minutes of constantly waving these people for mom and dad to understand that we were creating this from the car in front.

Creating joy is something we all can do. It is simple, and is so obvious as to be overlooked.

In Breckenridge Colorado, there’s a place where you can rent snowmobiles and drive along the tree line. It’s beautiful, crisply cold at a 10,000 foot elevation. As my daughter, Jordan and I, were zipping through the trees, the powdery snow was so lovely, the wind brisk against our cheeks. I hear her beautiful voice in my ear saying,

“Mom, look at what we created!”

Now, I knew what she meant, she’s the daughter of my heart as well as my genetics. She meant, we were creating this experience, at this moment in time, and isn’t it amazing. There’s a lot of gratitude in that. There’s a lot of gratitude and joy. We weren’t finished creating joy for ourselves and others. Kelly Sennholz, a friend who still lives in Denver, was with us that day, or rather, we were with her. Breckenridge is a very beautiful village a few miles away from our snowmobiling trail, in the mountains of Colorado. It had been a while and so I wanted to go to main street. While it appeared that we took a wrong turn it ended up being exactly right! We ended up being IN a PARADE! You see, Jordan was familiar with a similar experience when, previously, we had bubble wands in the car. We would let the bubbles blow out of our car onto the cars behind us. It never failed to create a smile on the faces in the cars behind us. They would wonder where the bubbles were coming from. And it always tickled us! So…

… Jordan was looking for a way to participate in the parade.

Kelly and I were accommodating her. Kelly had two bags of vitamin c drops. As it happens, along with spreading joy ,we were spreading good health, as Jordan stuck her tiny little head out of the sunroof and threw vitamin c drops to people lining the streets looking like we were every bit a part of this parade. Spreading joy is very easy. As we think about all the things that frighten us it’s easy to forget that we can start a movement in a blink. So do this.