I was contemplating joy and celebration this morning. Not about the big things in life, like new jobs, relationships, countries, but more about celebrating what is happening or has happened without the proviso of wanting more. Celebrating the now.

We all have moments of joy. When a friend calls, when you grow your first strawberry, when that dog in the street chooses you for a cuddle. However, that joy can be fleeting because almost as soon as we have experienced it, we find ourselves wanting more of it. Wanting that friend to call more often, more strawberries to grow, more friendly dogs. I find that this wanting more can diminish the joy you found, because we are telling ourselves that it wasn’t enough. We took something unexpected and joyful and increased our expectations of it.

When we do this, the joy starts to leave us because we are busy focusing on how we increase it. Rather than focusing on just bathing in the feeling of joy, we feel it slipping away when we expect more, and before we know it we can be sad about something that made us happy. We are no longer thinking, wow, that was so lovely, we are thinking, why don’t they call more? Why is my strawberry plant not producing? Why doesn’t that other dog want to come and see me? We focus on the negative. We set ourselves up for sadness and disappointment.

Instead we could try to hold onto the joy. We could say to ourselves that we might not speak to that friend very often, but we had a lovely conversation and it made us happy. We might only have grown one strawberry but we grew it, with our love and nurturing and it tastes so sweet. That dog chose us, singled us out as someone they trusted. If we never have those experiences again, it doesn’t matter, because we will always have the experiences we had which brought us joy.

An exercise that can help is to think of a day on which you felt joy. For example, today might be grey and wet, but this time last week you might have been out playing, reading, swimming on a sunshine filled afternoon. Instead of wishing for a better weather day today, think about that sunny day last week, try to bring to mind the joy you felt. Now look around you, see if you can bring that joy into today. What small things are you grateful for, what made you smile or laugh? It can’t always be sunny, but we can always look for some sun.