“Why are you SO OLD?” The voice of youth. My 12-year-old asked me this question quite innocently the other day. Everyone seems old when you’re a kid. But she’s right, I am on the older scale which she proved by following up with, “I mean you’re WAY older than all of my friend’s moms.” Guilty. “Why did you wait so long to have me?” A complicated question. We had one child and everything seemed perfect. Why rock the boat? So I told her, back then we couldn’t decide so we said a prayer and God gave her to us.

She looked at me and rolled her eyes, “and you did that THING”. Guilty again. Yeah…we did that too. But my point is, we did wait. Life just flew by and we turned around and my biological clock’s alarm started to sound.

When your kids are little and someone says, “It goes so fast”,  you don’t believe it. You’re up at night with someone vomiting or spiking a fever and you think, “This is NOT fast enough!”

But you turn around and they’re all grown up and those difficult stages just disappear. My mom always used to delight in everything the kids did. “Oh look how cute,” she’d say. She still says that actually. But she always reminded me to stop and listen and look and take it in-no matter how tired or frustrated I was. Wow was she right. You know you can't go back. And I realize now that you have to savor as much of life as you can.

So after that talk, my daughter and I sat out back and looked at the clouds. She saw a giraffe and I saw a bear...and we were together...and happy.

We all experience highs and lows in life.  It’s easy to be joyful during the high times, but the challenge is to remain joyful even in the low times, and find the gift in each new day.  I’ve come to the conclusion that joy is not just an emotion, but rather it is an attitude and a way of BEing.

Every day I set the intention to stay present in the moment and find joy in life by focusing my attention on positive aspects.  Some days this is easy while other days it is more challenging.  For that reason, I have been working for several years now to build awareness around triggers that keep me stuck in a pattern of negativity.  Oftentimes this happens when I am focused on the past or longing for the future.  

I find that awareness is the first step to change.  In this process of building awareness, I became aware of something that I hadn't realized I did quite often.  I noticed myself thinking (and even saying) "I just need to get through               (you can fill in the blank with the holidays, this day, or some event that was challenging for me). I realized that I was not enjoying life, but rather just “getting through it”.

Once I became aware of this joy-limiting behavior, I started to work on replacing those negative thoughts and feelings with ones of excitement around the action that I was identifying as challenging.  This involved changing the lens and looking at those challenges as opportunities for growth and expansion, ways to learn a new set of skills and strengthen my joy muscle.  

This is a work in progress, one that I continue to monitor and hope to someday master!