Can you engineer your life to be joyful?

At the University Unitarian Church in Seattle, the theme for the month of April was “joy.”

I think this theme is part of a cycle that was planned out before the results of the November elections became known. In any case, finding joy in these times has been challenging for many of us.

Last Sunday our UUC parent group discussed the issue of how we might cultivate joy in our own lives. Before we got very far, I pedantically insisted that we define joy, then noted my own lack of a good definition.

Fortunately, my wife was right there to offer a pithy one: “surprise and delight.”

This seemed like a perfect encapsulation of how I experience joy. But if surprise is necessary to experience  joy, does that mean that joy cannot be planned?

Again my wife had the answer: you cannot guarantee joy, but you can create conditions that make joy more likely. For example, you can strive to be sufficiently open-minded to retain your capacity for surprise; you can strive to get enough sleep to retain your capacity for delight.

Thanks, Wife!