How to Find the Little Joys in Life | #ReflectionMonday

More often than not, life hits us hard, and the weight of the unseen challenges do make us feel overwhelmed and occasionally burnt out.

In these moments, it’s often reclaiming our favorite things that helps the most. It does, for me. What about you?

Cliched as it might sound, it’s the simple joys that helps turn things around. Have you ever wondered why sky watching, or savouring a steaming cup of coffee or tea or even tapping away to the beat of our favourite band or composer can lift our spirits like nothing else?

Yes, these are just a few of the many random little things that help us stay afloat, find our mojo and get back to ourselves again. And God knows, how much we need them in our lives, even if only to brace up for more challenges that are waiting along the way!

Cribbing about things can only get us that far. The sense of despair that we rightfully feel at such moments are not to be denied (by all means we must acknowledge them!) but truth be told—holding on to these heavy feelings and emotions can only pull us down into the quicksand of anger, irritability and negativity.

So, what is it that really helps at such times? I guess, we all have our hacks that helps us respond best.

So, maybe, for some of us, it’s a book that brings comfort; for others, it’s music or perhaps a creative outlet viz., dancing or singing that provides an outlet to express the pent up emotions, so we can release the stress and finally return to the cherished parts of ourselves as a way of survival.

They remind us of who we are, grounding us amid chaos and offering a sense of peace when everything else feels uncertain.

What I’ve learnt from life is this—it’s in these small, familiar pleasures that we find calm, bliss and resilience. And a way to come back to ourselves.

To me, writing as an activity has been a very powerful means of processing all my difficult emotions and I happened to discover it rather accidentally. And so, most of the days, it has been writing and singing that have helped me perhaps in equal measures, lift the veil of sadness or loneliness or that intensely irritating and lingering sense of disillusionment and despair from within and replace it with clarity and a lightness of being, in a way very few things have.

In these last few weeks, I’ve gone through a roller coaster of mixed emotions, longed for a friend’s company, hoped for sunshine, desperately craved an afternoon of quiet undisturbed reading time, and even yearned for an abundance of energy and stamina, when the going got tough and the mind and body felt an acute sense of depletion, as if all the reserves of strength and positivity that one had, had suddenly dissipated into thin air!

It’s true when they say, that life has a way of turning us down when we desperately wish for something because the time has not been deemed right. That’s how we learn to wait. We learn to live with all our unfulfilled dreams and yearnings. We go round and round in circles for years, only to come home to ourselves one fine day and discover who we really are. Occasionally, though, we might even be blessed with some wisdom along the way and by now, we’ve also acquired the ability to laugh at ourselves for all the wishful thinking that kept us busy through life, for all the things that now feel really meaningless.

In the end, we always come back, over and over again, to these little things in life. It is these that fill us up with a wholesome sense of peace and calm, refuel our souls and make us whole again.

All the little every day things…

…like the sound of rain on a wet afternoon….or curling up with a book on a cold evening. Maybe, soaking in the sunshine after a long spell of grays….or basking in the bliss of a moonlit night with a loved one. Perhaps, dancing to the songs of a favourite band or singer…or solving a Sudoku puzzle in record time. What about creating an artwork and getting it right the first time? Maybe, it’s about basking in happy memories with loved ones who are no longer with us. And yes, looking back at how we survived the toughest moments in life, which somehow don’t look scary at all any more. For me, it could be lighting a candle and enjoying its soft glow…or decluttering my closet and suddenly feeling a huge weight lifted off the chest quite magically? Maybe, even sending a heartfelt message to a dear one without expecting anything in return.

These and many, many more… In fact, there could be a million more things to add to this list, and I know you will definitely add yours to it, so I shall leave it for you to fill it the way you think best.

All I can say today is this—in the end, it’s always the little things in life that save us from drowning. The storms will come and go, but not before they push us out of our comfort zones, nudging us stand under the open skies and teaching us to enjoy in the rain.

My dear reader, no matter how tough life feels at the moment, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. Always. Even when we cannot see it from where we are right now. In the end, it’s all about the light and hope and the little things that matter the most.