Hello our fabulous ChewsJoysters 🙂
We just got back from a wonderful trip to New York aka The Big Apple 🙂 We saw some awesome shows, had some awesome food, and well…just basically had an awesome time exploring joy in New York City 🙂
Here are a couple things we learned:
-When a door closes, another one opens – trust me on this 🙂
-There’s nothing like breathing the same air, being in the same space as an actor or theatrical event that can immerse you from start to finish. Both Hamilton and Then She Fell were shows that really took us on amazing experiential journeys…journeys that cannot be done in any other way than through the medium of live theater.
-I often feel that you can judge an area based on the way the people living there treat their tourists and visitors. Though we did have the occasional cab driver who tried to take advantage of our wallets in NYC, we really did feel like the people of New York were very very nice! We couldn’t go anywhere without someone helping us out, pointing us in the right direction, and giving us helpful tips! So…never judge a group of people based on what you’ve heard about them – go and experience them for yourself and then make a decision 🙂 In our opinion, New Yorkers weren’t cold or mean or anything like that – they were super kind and loved to help out the wandering tourists!
-Elegance and Relevance are the keys to raising money 🙂
-Focusing on what really matters in the long run helps us to place our priorities on the experiences that will bring us the most joy 🙂
You can watch and explore our NYC lessons about joy more in depth by watching our video below:
We are writing our first post after our awesome Europe trip and all we can say is
OHMYGASHSOOAMAZINGAHHHHHH!!
Today’s post will focus on all the crazy amazing (yet nerdy) things we did in England!
Soooooo first we arrive at our hotel and grab a few cookies at the front desk (ahhh how I love you Doubletree hotels…)
To see more of our journey to England you can watch our video here:
The next day we awoke and hopped on a two hour train ride to Cardiff – why? Because of the Doctor Who Experience which happens to be closing quite soon, so as Whovians brought together in love by the power of Doctor Who, it was definitely something we did not want to miss…
If you want to watch us experience the Doctor Who Experience, you can watch this video here:
Basically in a nutshell:
OHMYGASHSOOAMAZINGDOCTORWHOAHHHHHH!!
Then after we nerded our brains out over Daleks and Doctors and every set and prop known to the show, we went forward with our next fandom: Harry Potter…
To preface this Harry Potter portion, I should mention why we even planned this trip in the first place. On February 14 2016 my dear husband Jonathan surprised me with my Valentine’s gift of tickets to Harry Potter and The Cursed child. So for a little over a year we’ve been geeking out and planning the ultimate Harry Potter experience in anticipation of seeing the show in London.
Re-reading the books (yet avoiding reading Cursed Child so we could be surprised at everything), rewatching the movies, and booking all tickets and tours was involved during this time. Aaaaand Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them also came out and we got to experience a new portion of the Potter universe.
All in all, we were just a “tad” excited to experience everything and anything Potter.
You can watch our journey here which includes the Harry Potter Studio Tour, a Muggle Tour, The House of Minalima, and of course, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child:
Now filming was strictly prohibited inside the theater so we don’t have any footage of the play but we can definitely say it took our breath away. The special effects and staging in particular were especially magical and left us wanting to sit in the theater for days on end.
And seeing our favorite trio all grown up?! Incredible! Ron, Hermione, and Harry all lived up to the life I would want them to have after book 7 closed. It was a truly magical experience for a Harry Potter fan and we will #keepthesecrets and say no more about the plot of the wonderful play.
So all in all, what did we learn about Joy on this particular portion of our trip to England?
-Find others who share your fandoms, your interests, and weird likes. Geeking out together is one of those sweet joys in life that can only come when we aren’t ashamed to say we love something and don’t care what others think of us because of it. When nerds are together, it just feels like we’re all cool.
-Joy is often found in the kindness of strangers. When you are traveling in a foreign country you are often at the mercy of the people who live there. Smiles, kind interactions, and positivity really made our day and helped us to navigate an unknown city so much better. It reminded me how much I need to remember kindness when foreigners are trying to navigate our home here in the States. Helpfulness begets joy and makes the world a better place to live in.
-JK Rowling = Joy. I wish I could personally thank her for expanding the Potter universe in such an amazing way. I know she could have easily stopped the stories of Harry and his world after she got her billions from writing the 7 Potter books, but I’m so glad she is catering to her fans in such immersive and expansive ways. From sites like Pottermore to putting the Wizarding World into a theme park, and of course everything we did in London – Rowling has made fans shed tears of gratitude and joy as we have watched the magical world become even MORE magical (if that’s even possible)
-Count your blessings and treat everyday as precious. Our Doubletree hotel happened to be located right next to Parliament and we walked passed it every day to get to the metro station. You can watch our #3MinuteJoy video here which shows us contemplating joy on our daily walk past Parliament:
Shortly after we left London for Paris, terrible acts of terror occurred at Parliament and several victims were killed and injured. We were shocked to learn this happened and our hearts went out immediately to all the families who had loved ones who suffered because of the attacks. If timing was just slightly different, those victims very well could have been myself and my family. People were there just like us: enjoying a dream vacation… or passing by on their way to the metro…some were just there doing their jobs… No one deserves to die or suffer because of one persons selfishness and hatred.
This all hits very close to home since we were so close in timing to being in London during this occurrence.
Now, Jonathan and I feel an even stronger desire to pursue, study, and and spread joy to the world. Where hate is so strong, joy and love can mend and melt the terrible away. If we’ve learned anything from Harry Potter it’s that,
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” ~ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Wrote my first Medium article today! Here it is in full:
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” ~Napolean HIll
If one thing’s for sure, we are all on a quest for happiness. The founding fathers were brilliant to state our rights are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” because for some reason we, as a society, are always in a constant pursuit of that elusive, ephemeral, diaphanous entity.
It continually escapes us each and every day.
I’ve been reading and researching a lot of books on Happiness and recently stumbled upon a deeper level of it that we all know as “Joy” which we’ve all heard but never have fully understood.
Dictionary.com defines Joy as, “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.”
As you can see, they are very similar, but in my many years of delving into books and hours of listening to YouTube/TED Talks/experts on happiness that JOY is actually the long-lasting version of happiness. For we are on a life-long quest to find happiness, but what we really should be striving for is longterm joy and contentment.
What’s interesting is that we all WANT happiness, and we spend most of our days trying to achieve it, only to finally not choose it because we are too busy chasing it. It’s a very strange and weird paradox that we find ourselves in.
So we fall into different ways of achieving it, which leads to both good and bad ways of “getting” it. And a lot of us go the chemical route, whether through stuffing our face out with our favorite foods, or going shopping, or doing drugs, or having sex, etc. Our brains get flushed with dopamine and we suddenly think that this is happiness. Our current culture lives on this temporary “instant gratification” strata that tricks us into believing that this is what life’s purpose is and that we should all live in constant state of hedonism because that’s what “happiness” is all about.
But, even though I’m a huge advocate of the positive psychology movement, I’ve been exploring this concept of JOY and how to find and cultivate THAT state of mind, and maintain it. Rather than searching for moments of fleeting seconds of pleasure, why not focus attention on building a support network of things that will sustain a longer-term period of contentment. That is what experts are now calling JOY.
It’s a word that has been around for centuries and is now being looked at with new light. And the jury is still out on how to ultimately achieve it, but some recent findings have found things like building a close network of friends that you can trust with your life, having a weekly game night, finding some silence and solitude, etc.
My 10,000 year old brain, back in the hunter gatherer days didn’t know when the next meal would be, so it learned to eat as much as possible and crave sugar, salt, fat. But now our neo-cortex’s can help us think much longer term and rationalize that we will actually be more unhappy if we stuff ourselves.
So following the “Eat, Move, Sleep” model, we have to return to our basics and re-train our minds and brains to think in the 21st century. It’s going to be a long journey, and building habits take at least 67 days, but starting is half the battle and it begins with a single step.
I recently came across an extremely interesting concept called “The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion” that was taught in a Coursera class on Happiness by Professor Raj Ragunathan. It was a suggestion for an approach to pursuing goals as a way to maximizing Happiness which involves having a certain “preference” for certain outcomes over other outcomes “before” these outcomes occur, but “not judging” outcomes “after” they’ve occurred which mitigates the negativity from categorizing certain outcomes as bad outcomes.
He went on to say that this is actually quite difficult to achieve because we have to make a “Mind-Switch” from what he calls a “pre-occurraence preference” to a “post-occurrence non-judgementalism” which basically means that we have to go from wanting things a certain way to accepting and acknowledging how things turned out whether negative or positive because we don’t know whether they really ARE negative or positive in the long run.
There’s a TED Talk by a David Steindeldrass, a famous Catholic Benedictine monk, who says that we don’t have to be grateful for everything, but we DO have the OPPORTUNITY to be grateful in every moment; that we should RISE to the CHALLENGE of finding the opportunity in that very bad moment that we perceive as negative, we are given the opportunity to ENJOY. We can rise up to meet the challenge by learning something, to suffer, to stand up for our convictions. “We always get another opportunity,” he goes on to say, “That’s the wonderful richness of life.”
Thus, we can be grateful, even when negative things happen to us. This is something very tough to put into practice, but Dr. Raj asks us to start upon an exercise that will help you turn that negative energy into a meaningful positive one which is the act of writing down 3 apparently bad things that happened during the day that later turned out to be good.
Here are the 3 that I wrote down:
We went Pokemon hunting with our parents yesterday and didn’t catch any super rare Pokemon, but we got to go to a part of Long Beach we’d never been to as a family, AND we caught enough Magikarp to evolve a Gyarados.
We woke up late and didn’t get to go hiking at O’Melveny Park in time, but we got to see where the trails went and what kind of clothes we should wear the next time we go.
We were stuck in traffic for a very long time on our way down to the Family Party, but I was able to write another chapter of my writing challenge and watch 2 videos of my Coursera course!
So now looking back on those events, I actually don’t consider them bad at all because they actually helped me achieve other goals that I had been wanting to accomplish.
I’ve been struggling with a strange form of control where if something doesn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, I let that moment steal away my happiness and I concentrate on how I didn’t get what I wanted. However, if I just embrace the process and know that I have certain preferential outcomes, and after that outcome happens, not imposing any judgement on it, instead accept how things turned out and actually see the opportunity to enjoy and see the positive outcomes from it, then I can retain my happiness and fully embrace it to fully live life and all the wonder it holds. Because, there will always be more good things to come, and even good things to come that are hidden in the present moment that we just don’t see or realize. So we have to train ourselves every day, every single moment, to see those things that God is trying to reveal to us.
I think this is the first step to developing that “Implicit Trust” in life, and know that everything will be okay, and that we’re taken care of in ways we just can’t see yet.
