I love the idea of small joys. I love both the idea that life is full of small joys that creep up on us and that we can intentionally bring more joy into our life by doing the small things that embody it. Taking my cue from El Rhodes* and her Twitterseries #smalljoy365, I created my own joy jar. Well, a tureen actually, because that was what I had to hand. A stash of tiny slips of paper with little ideas written on them for things that might add joy to a day. It took me months to come up with them. They had to be small. They had to be do-able. They had to be joy- (or pleasure-) inducing. Or delight. Or comfort. I bent the rules.
Then I realised that they weren’t “rules” so I could abandon them and just use my stash any way I chose. My first “let go” was the idea that I had to do one of these things every day. That opened up the idea that some days are joyful all by themselves without my help. And allowed for the idea that some days are not meant for joy at all and that will be ok too.
As I write this, I have only just embarked on this experiment…because that’s how I see it. It’s an experiment in seeing if we can be intentional about joy, pleasure, delight, comfort. An experiment in seeing if the things I think will bring me something good (joy, pleasure, delight, comfort, amusement, fun…the list will expand) actually do so. I make no commitment to come back and share the results, but I also know that by-&-large, I will. I suspect that the experiences will also feed into other blogs, and poems, as well as Tweets (yes, I’m staying with that name!), and other writing. For me, the measure of success will be that when the tureen is empty, I refill it and start over.
On that score, I am saving some of the deployed slips and disposing of others and noting other little things that just happened that could be the basis for future intentionality.
Intentionality. On my spiritual journey – sorry if that’s a bit pretentious, but I have no other way of putting it – one of the deepest lessons I have learned to date is the importance of intentionality. My aspiration, somewhat belatedly, is to live an intentional life. I think I have mostly done so anyway, almost by default. Clive told me once that he was not surprised that I had no really big unfulfilled ambitions; it seemed to him that I simply decided what I wanted to do and then did it. By definition you cannot ‘live intentionally’ by default. It’s a non-sequitur or an oxymoron or something. But perhaps you can be naturally intentional, before you understand what it means or how important it is. Perhaps that is the gift I was given.
We can start our year on any day in the cycle of seasons. I choose to start mine either on my birthday or at the Winter Solstice. It fluctuates. I don’t like things to be too set-in-stone. In terms of this embarkation, the small joy journey, I chose the Solstice…but it was a few days later that I pulled out the slip that said, “Smile at a stranger”.
I’d been home for a couple of days. By being home I mean, I hadn’t stepped further away from my door than the deck for tai chi practice and the bottom of the garden to feed the birds. It had been a turbulent week previous, ups & downs, and ricochets and ripples. I needed quietness, and half-light. I needed what a friend calls ‘hermit time’ and I increasingly think of as ‘cave time’. Retreat.
The first few ‘joys’ turned out to be very much home focussed. That has me wondering how much synchronicity or kairomancy there will be in the order in which they are pulled from the pot. But then came "Smile at a stranger".
To be fair, I often do. I know that I can have quite a sullen face a lot of the time. I don’t know where that came from and I’m working on shifting it, so I make a point of trying to smile at people…but I spend a lot of time in my own head, so I’m sure I forget. Nevertheless I have days when I make a point of smiling at people in the street and just noticing how they respond. I don’t read anything into their response, I cannot know what kind of day, week, month, life they are having. I don’t take anyone's failure to smile back personally. But I love it when they do respond in kind. I love it when the smile takes them by surprise…and they are surprised into smiling back. That’s when I think just maybe I have made their day a little better.
Isn’t that awesome? That by something as simple as smiling, I might make someone feel that they are actually seen. That I might make them think there are still good people in the world. That I might nudge them to look for good things rather than bad ones.
And so one day last week, without any wondering about what good it would do – for me or for anyone else – I just went with the programme. My little pink slip said Smile at a stranger. That meant I had to find a stranger to smile at, so I had to at least get beyond my own gate. A win already. I had to go walk.
So I walked my local route…down the road, through the woods, around the broad and back again. Rather than smiling at ‘a’ stranger, I quickly made the decision to smile at everyone. Not everyone smiled back. Most did. Some possibly didn’t notice. Some clearly had things on their mind. Some were sulky teenagers who just know it is really uncool to smile at random strangers. Some were reading their phones or listening to something on headphones. Some were deep in conversation with the people they were with. Some were deep in conversation with the sky and the lake and the woods.
One or two actually scowled in response…I don’t know what their problem was. That isn’t just a turn of phrase, I mean it literally: I do not know what was going on in their head. I do know that I have also, in the past, been the person to rebut a cheery comment with venom, because it was the last thing I needed to hear at the time.
A smile is a gift, given freely. We have no right to expect reciprocation. Perhaps, the lack of return is a call to greater empathy.
And so…I went out…and I walked…and I smiled…
I smiled at the runner in high-viz lycra, and the lady with flowers on her bicycle (who turned out not to be a stranger at all, but an acquaintance from my swimming pool). I smiled at the old couple walking hand-in-hand.
And the Indian family, the son in undone silk shirt being all macho, his women-folk (mother, girlfriend, sisters?) wrapped against the damp.
At the dog-walkers, and the man who held his arm out to land a drone as if it were a hawk returning to his gauntlet.
The father and son racing each other and checking their times. The angler who said ‘good morning’ although it was two in the afternoon, the one who cared not for time.
The poet and the lovers and the picnickers who sat or stood waiting for the smudge of a sun to fall lower and maybe set the sky on fire.
The bobble-hatted ones, and ones in stripey scarves. And the child with a bubble-gun setting spheres of rainbows to play among the serious rusting sculptures.
The one with his mobile phone who looked at me suspiciously as I stole a few sprigs of holly, and all of the spaniels that came and went scenting things only dogs can scent.
I smiled at the muddy footpaths, and my tree that now has a broken limb. The turgid waters of the river. The plodge of footsteps on wet ground. The vibrancy of moss. I smiled at mushrooms, still growing on deadwood. At the distant swan, and the shag, and the bird-call I didn’t recognise. At the silvered reeds against the paling sky.
I smiled at the recognition of how much work I still have to do. And how much I was looking forward to a hot shower.
I smiled at the water, and at the long grass that (this time) failed to clean my boots.
I smiled at the ‘rabbit woman’ sculpture**, newly gilded for the party season (so I thought), only then I noticed she was crying, and I knew I would have to come home and look up who she really is – and my smile would become a sadder one.
Eventually, as I plodded back home, I realised that I was smiling for the sake of the smile itself. I was smiling just because it felt good. And because when I did, most of those strangers that I passed today and will most probably never see again, and certainly never recognise again, smiled back.
And that made me feel good.
*You'll find El Rhodes on Twitter (!) as @electra_rhodes
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The sculpture in question is Leiko Ikemura’s Usagi Kannon - more information on the story of the original piece availablehere LeikoIkemura: Usagi Kannon | Norfolk & Norwich Festival (nnfestival.org.uk) nowreplaced with a bronze version.
