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Fred, Ingrid, Jen, and Kurt: My Joy Hunting Inspirations

Posted on by demand13bg

One of the underlying principles of demanding the shimmer is to cultivate celebration in our day-to-day lives. I think that notion might overwhelm some busy people who might interpret celebration as one more thing to do. Sometimes making a big, all-in, shimmery, outsized deal about something considered ordinary can be truly wonderful and worth the effort.  But most of the time, demanding the shimmer is just a little kick up. And I think one of the best ways to work your shimmer muscles is to get in the everyday habit of joy hunting. This is a practice I’ve been cultivating for many years now.  This practice became a lot more intentional during the pandemic lockdown, and though it admittedly wanes here and there, lately I’ve been finding it nothing less than essential. 

 

I’ve spent some time lately thinking about the origins of this practice, and four people came to mind as important inspirations for my practice – three are people I don’t actually know personally, and one is the one I know the very best. Each of these people share a practice that I think all fall under this umbrella of joy hunting. 

 

What exactly is joy hunting?  It is whatever you are likely thinking it is, because what it looks like is going to be a little different for everyone. Essentially it is a practice of seeking out evidence of joy (and it’s cousins: wonder, beauty, love).

 

Fred Rogers (best known as Mr. Rogers, of course) taught us to look for the helpers. There are memes galore online about this idea, especially now when the world is so uncertain at best and terrifying at worse, for some more than others.  Finding evidence for acts of help and care gives us hope and may inspire us to more intentionally be the helpers.

 

Ingrid Fetell Lee, in her book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness (2009) and on her website The Aesthetics of Joy teaches the practice of joyspotting. She is a designer who teaches principles of joy in design, ranging from harmony and renewal to abundance and surprise.  After reading that book, I had such fun practicing joy spotting in the elements of design in my own space, and then worked to incorporate more. During COVID she launched a Facebook group called The Joyspotters Society that allowed people space to post photos of the evidence of joy they found on walks or in their own spaces to help keep each other buoyed.  She also started featuring some active members of the community with featured bio posts. Guess who got to be in the Joyspotters Spotlight one time?!? Can you see me beaming at the memory?

 

Over lockdown I also read Jen Pastiloff’s book On Being Human (2019) – a beautiful memoir of a woman struggling with loss, mental health, and progressive hearing loss at a young age.  It is in equal measure heartrending and inspirational, and what stuck with me most was her practice of beauty hunting.  Her beauty hunting is another perspective on the practice of joyspotting. It got me looking in unexpected places for evidence of beauty, and I think it broadened my perspective on what beauty is to me.

 

This brings me to my favorite partner in joy hunting, Kurt.  Many years ago on his birthday, when he was alone at a bar (Duke’s) in Waikiki, Kurt invented a beauty spotting practice of his own. Annoyed at his own tendencies to feel critical of strangers in a crowd, he decided to play a game. He would pick random people in the crowded bar and find something beautiful about them and describe that feature in detail in his head.  Of course there are people who exude obvious beauty, but once you start this practice, it is impossible not to see beauty in everyone. This isn’t meant to promote objectifying people for their physical features. In fact, we often note the beauty in the way they are looking at their partner, their funky choice in eyeglasses, or their contagious laugh. We play this game together sometimes when we are out and it is one of the most joyful things to do.  It is antithetical to all the meanness, criticism, and disdain we witness every day. 

 

All of these are different manifestations of joy hunting. It’s an activity but also an intentional approach to being in the world that can eventually become a life enhancing habit.  True, it may be more natural to do this when times seem optimistic, but perhaps even more important to practice when they aren’t.

 

Happy hunting!

 

 

 

 

Holiday Invention #1 – Big Walk Day

Posted on by demand13bg

My life partner, Kurt, and I are long distance by choice (our podcast on this, Apartners, will be launching in December or January – eek – stay tuned!). One of my favorite things about our relationship of over twelve years is that we have made up a bunch of holidays that we celebrate every year. I’m sure that plenty of couples, and probably especially those with children, have special rituals and traditions that they do regularly. It’s my observation, though, that these are typically associated with traditional holidays or birthdays. On the other hand, many of ours are just made up completely independent of those things and designed in part to be sources of anticipation. I wanted to share a few of ours in case they may be a springboard of inspiration.  This month I am going to highlight one of my favorites:  Big Walk Day.

 

Kurt and I both love to walk. We may be just a bit obsessed with our step goals (ok, by we I really mean me). We also are very fortunate and privileged to be able to travel fairly regularly, and firmly believe that walking around a new place is the best way to enjoy it. Big Walk Day actually was sort of invented by accident. Kurt had an opportunity to teach a course in the summers in Honolulu for a few years, and one day ago we decided to walk from our friend’s condo where we were staying to downtown rather than hopping on the bus. It was a beautiful day and we just kept wandering around, and we realized at some point that we’d probably end up with over 30,000 steps that day. We patted ourselves on the back for this over cocktails and snacks, and we decided then and there that the following year we’d go for 40,000: Big Walk Day was born.

 

This quickly became a much-anticipated holiday that still continues. It happens in the summer, and we’ve done it so far in Hawaii, Memphis, and New Orleans. It involves setting a step goal given our current physical states (one year we took it a bit too far and I got a little sick, likely from dehydration; lesson learned and we no longer try to beat the top time each year and I’ve doubled down on the water). Then, Kurt maps out a general route that should get us back to our starting point about the point we should be reaching that step goal, give or take.  To put a typical goal in perspective, we usually go around 50K steps, which is over 20 miles, and do it over the course of a 12-14 hour day.

 

For any of you thinking this is a big workout, health-focused thing, let me disabuse you of that idea!  Big Walk Day includes a big breakfast out, coffee and treats, lunch, beer, and dinner. Ok, sometimes more beer in between. We always have a plan about when the next stop will be – some of the stretches are longer than others, and we make an unplanned stop if we need a rest.  We take lots of photos (and post a selfie at every 10K steps on social media – shown above is us mid-walk one year). We each plan out topics to talk about, but we also have some really random and often funny conversations prompted by things we see. We are also comfortable with long stretches of silence, just focused on being where we are and keeping moving.

 

I think there are a lot of different reasons why Big Walk Day is one of our favorite days of the year, and several of them tie into themes I’ve written about here in Demand the Shimmer in the past.  First, of course, it is a ritual, and there are so many satisfying elements of rituals in our life (I wrote about Rituals vs. Routines in one of my first Demand the Shimmer blog posts).   

 

Anticipation is such an underappreciated emotion, and it’s so important to always have things (in the day, the next week, the month, the year) that you are really looking forward to.  We don’t celebrate Big Walk Day on the same day each year, but it’s almost always in the summer.  When we do it in a place we’ve done it before, we make sure to include some of our favorite spots (big shout out to Bogart’s Café in Waikiki and their spectacular Mama’s Fried Rice – breakfast of champions!). We also try to add at least one stop we’ve never been to before to be able to look forward to new discoveries that may or may not eventually become favorites. Because Kurt and I live apart, planning when and where we will be together in the course of a year is a regular part of our relationship, and during the course of this we can generally get a sense of when Big Walk Day will be and start to get excited about it.

 

Setting goals as a couple (or as a family, or a pair of friends) is a great connection builder.  Breaking out of the habits of the things you typically do together on a day off helps to see one another through fresh eyes, and accomplishing something moderately challenging together and celebrating the win is pretty exhilarating. There is also something magical about literally falling in sync with other people by matching their pace and sharing repeated movements while experiencing the same sights and sounds.

 

If Big Walk Day sounds intriguing to you, please make it your holiday too! But if walking isn’t something you are able to or are interested in doing, what type of day-long ritual can you create – with a partner, family, friends, or on your own?  How can you introduce the elements of anticipation, detail planning, and a moderate challenge of some sort?  Is there a time of year you think you get in a rut that this could spark you out of? 

 

Happy Holiday!

 

 

 

Savor Watching

Posted on by demand13bg

 

It’s pretty typical to have someone ask you what you’re binge-watching, but you never hear people ask about savor-watching.  I am a savor-watcher.  I think in part it might stem from my love of a ritual. I used to love looking forward to Mad Men on Sunday nights – and for y’all who are my age-ish, who can forget Must-See Thursdays on NBC?  I still remember counting down ‘til Saturday night and the Love Boat as a kid (I realllllly wanted to be Julie McCoy when I grew up). 

 

Watching a bunch of episodes in a row of a show doesn’t really appeal to me. In fact, these days I find I can’t even watch a whole episode of a show at a time – I’ll often spread the one episode out over a couple times in the week, or even across weeks.  That way I can spend time with Midge Maisel and Jonathan Van Ness and Mr. Kim and Emily Cooper for a much longer stretch of my life than I would have otherwise.  In between, I can anticipate.

 

I think anticipation is one of the most underrated emotions, but more on that coming soon about that with my ode to the long distance relationship. Stay tuned!

 

Back to savor-watching. I think it’s part of an obsession I’ve been having with the idea of savoring as a key component of a joyful life.  Research in the field of positive psychology has seen an uptick in scientific interest in the effects of efforts to increase people’s savoring in various aspects of their lives.

 

Proponents of positive psychology recognize that while it is really important to help people cope with negative experiences and states, that is just one side of the coin. It is also vital help people who are doing just fine go from fine to thriving and flourishing.  This is definitely on brand with Demand the Shimmer. One of the researchers lighting the path toward more scientific work on savoring is Dr. Fred Bryant from Loyola University in Chicago.  He and his colleagues recognized that just as people can learn to proactively cope with negative stuff, they should also be able to proactively increase their joy in reaction to positive stuff.  Savoring is the practice of doing just that, and it can involve the whole process of anticipating something awesome, mindfully experiencing the moment of awesomeness, and actively practicing reminiscing about the awesomeness. 

 

Some other savoring practices I’ve been trying to put into place this summer include:

 

  • Taking the last meal of a vacation or the last leg of a road trip to review the whole thing event-by-event with whomever I am with to relive all the fun memories again. Typically, different people will have had different little memories stick, so sharing expands everyone’s experience.  And, If I do a daytrip alone, I’ll actually talk the details out loud or write them down so I can relive them before the memories fade.

 

  • If I see something beautiful or funny or interesting, like most of us I am quick to snap a photo, but I try to stop and really look carefully and savor the moment rather than count on a pic I may never return to.

 

  • This one might sound a bit weird, but when I have a feeling of joy or happiness come over me, I try to stop and say (out loud, even if I’m alone) “I am so happy.” Noting happiness and sitting with it for a few extra beats helps to expand it.

 

  • Keeping a one-line-a-day journal where the one line or phrase is the most fun moment of the day. Even a crappy day often has at least a moment of humor, connection, or beauty.

 

Although savor-watching and some of these other savoring practices come pretty naturally to me, I really struggle with the type of savoring people typically think of first – eating slowly and savoring food.  I am and have always been a fast eater, as much as I try to slow down.  In fact, I’m writing this at a coffee shop and I just got to the last bite of a delicious pan au chocolate before realizing I had finished it mindlessly.  I am going to double down the efforts on this; I know it will be worth it.

 

What will you try to savor?

 

 

Cheers,

Lisa