Introduction

Welcome back to Live Free Creative. I’m so glad that you’re here. You’re listening to episode number 210, Lightening Up Your Life with Small Daily Joys.

This is not the episode that I had planned for this week. I usually brainstorm these episodes a few months in advance so I can do a little bit of research and kind of dig in. I like to plan. You know this if you’ve been listening for a while to this show. I like to have things figured out a little bit ahead of schedule. That not only makes me feel prepared, but it also gives me freedom in my life for the spontaneity.

This week, I was telling Dave about this phenomenon that I recognized in my life over the last couple weeks, and I thought that it would be good to share it here in case any of you need to hear it as well or you need this little bit of motivation. I think any of us, all of us could use, a little reminder to keep things light and lovely in life, even when life can sometimes be challenging, it still feels so much better to lighten it up.

I’ll give you a little bit of background and walk you through the scenario and some tips that I have for lightening up your life with some small daily joys.

Segment: Pause for a Poem

Why shouldn’t I stop and smell the espresso beans / Or say in a voice a little too loud, This is the best margarita I’ve ever had!! / Or use the full curse word / Or have my dessert first / Why shouldn’t I give it my all  / And do it for the story  / And leap before looking / And let love consume me / Why shouldn’t I use my expensive face cream with abandon / Triple text my crush / Laugh at my own jokes / Cry at commercials / Sing at the top of my lungs while I vacuum / Buy the orange chair / Paint the town purple / And fly across the country for the weekend just to pinch a cheek / Why shouldn’t I hold your face in both of my hands at 11:30 AM on a Tuesday while you’re chopping a salad, and remind you that you are the center of my happiest days / Why shouldn’t I memorize how the sun comes in from the front window / Turn the music up / Give the dog a piece of cheese / Say what I mean /Let my hair down / Forgive fast /Believe that the best is yet to come / Tell me– No, really– Why shouldn’t I? / Why shouldn’t we? / Why shouldn’t you?

It’s called Maximalism Babe by Lindsay Rush, also known as @MaryOliversDrunkCousin on Instagram.

Gosh, that’s good. Do you feel it like in the gut, all the beauty and whimsy and. Even the monotony of some of those things that we sometimes don’t do. Why not? Why shouldn’t we? I love that one. I also just stumbled across this Mary Oliver’s drunk cousin recently on Instagram and immediately started following, scrolling back through some of these just poignant, visceral poems.

Life Got Heavy

I’m going to try to set the stage for you a little bit here. It’s funny because when I think about going back to like, when did this sort of transition begin in my life, I start saying at the beginning of the year we decided to move. And so that was a little complicated.

But then I go back a little bit further to we lived in this house; we did this big renovation, and we had a big flood and that was all overwhelming.

And before that, like we moved across the country and downsized by over half. And before that we lived in Texas and had a new job. And so, what I’m getting at. Things are always a little, things can always be a little bit complicated.

There’s never– at least in my experience– there hasn’t been a real long period of time when I’ve thought, Gosh, things are all just going so perfectly smooth that there’s, that I wouldn’t change a thing.

There’s always just a little hitch here or there. And for the most part, we’ve been able to just feel okay about all of them, you take things in stride. Obstacles and challenges are part of life, and we use them as fuel for learning and for growth and for, as steppingstones for getting to where we want to be for increasing our resilience and staying open.

And then the last couple years, I think, universally have been harder for all of us than we expected. And I know: regarding the pandemic, most of us feel like we’re in the clear, or like on the other side of it, although right now my neighbor across the street has Covid and it’s knocked her out and she’s out of work for the week and stuff.

So, I know that it’s not absolutely off the table. It has, the last couple years were quite a challenge though, and I look back and recognize from 2020 on, we’re now two, almost three years into. life being turned upside down in ways that none of us expected and we all had to figure out how to make our way through.

And some of those things still affect us now. Some of the challenges that we faced because of Covid or just because of time going on, or decisions that we’ve made.

I think all of us, it’s fair to say that all of us. have had a very challenging few years, and whether it had to do with the global pandemic or with war, or with social justice issues, or with politics, or with family challenges or with health challenges, I feel deeply, I saw on Instagram one of those “be kind because everyone you meet is going through a battle, like an unseen battle.”

I think that’s not exactly the, that’s like a paraphrasing of the quote. I read that this morning and it hit me so fully. This is so true. We are all going through internal and external things. Challenges that may or may not feel heavy or feel really challenging, and everyone is, every single person universally.

Experiences, obstacles, and challenges in their lives. It’s just a part of being alive. It’s a part of being human in my life, the last year or so has felt funky.

Moving Pulled The Rug Out

It hasn’t all been like one big challenge, but somehow making such a quick decision to move in December of last year. Really like spun us off kilter a little bit. Like we had things, we generally have things a little bit planned. We had things planned and then we shifted those things very quickly. We did, we decided from one day to the next to put an offer on a house and then it was accepted, and then that meant we needed to turn around and sell our house.

And so, I spent two full weeks getting our house ready and we listed our house and it sold. And it was really, like objectively really. Lucky and great situation. Then we were gone for the holidays and my family had covid abroad and I came home and had to close on the houses by myself and the family was able to come home a couple weeks later after quarantine and thus began 2022 for us in this real upside-down way in a new house.

The kids had missed the first two weeks of school of the new year. Everything felt a little upside down and backwards for a while, and that’s expected. I knew that. Even though we didn’t move very far away, still in the same city, still same job. That moving turns things upside down.

That doesn’t, it’s really neither here nor there except for that, that the decision to move, like I still feel like we’re settling in. To our new home and we like it and it’s great and it’s a better fit for our family, and we have some ability to stay there longer term than with our previous house that didn’t have as much room to grow. So, we’re not quite settled still and that’s okay. It takes time. That is like one layer of then what feels like several additional layers that have been challenging for us this last year, including some, personal family health issues, some. Struggles with our kids. Some tragedy in our extended family, a couple different unexpected things happening in our extended family.

I was overjoyed, just enthusiastic about being accepted to school, and I’ve been loving that. I hope that you’re loving listening to little snippets of it on Happy Class, and I have mentioned this there. And I will mention it here again, that I totally underestimated the amount of work that it would be, the amount of time they had told us, plan to spend 30 to 35 hours a week on school.

And I thought, oh yeah, no big deal. And turns out like it really is like adding a fulltime job on top of what already was a job. And my roles and responsibilities and relationships, all of this to say whether you relate or not, things have been tough. Not just like in the, in a short period of time, but it feels like an extended period that we’ve just felt a little bit off all of this to say that it was through this lens that I was listening to me.

One of my mentors in school, I was assigned a journal reader who’s a mentor in the program. We were on a call last week and just getting to know each other. This is the first time we had spoken live. We had communicated, but not like concurrently. So, we hopped on a Zoom call, and we were chatting and just getting to know each other, and I asked about his background, and he told me that his initial career was in musical theater that he had grown up performing and singing.

Remembering My Roots: Singing in the Shower

And so, his first sort of, real career was musical theater. He was a performer, and then he worked for the theater company. As he was telling me about this, I was thinking about how I loved performing growing up as well. I didn’t do theater, but I did, I was part of a performing group for about six years. When I was in high school, I was on the drill team and the dance team. I sang my whole life. I was in choirs and sang solos in assemblies and different things. I really grew, I grew up loving to perform and I grew up loving listening to musical theater.

I love Broadway. It’s been fun. I went to New York. A couple weeks ago and got to see Music Man, and I just loved it. It was so fun, and it was like listening to my mentor tell me about that part of his life, reminded me that is something that I really like. It’s something that I really like.

And I went home after the call. I was at a co-working space for the call, and I went home and took a shower to change, to get ready to go somewhere else. And I started singing in the shower, I started. The first song that came to mind was, Don’t Rain on my parade. “Don’t tell me not to live. Just sit in, put live candy in the sun’s, a ball of butter. Don’t bring around a cloud to rain on my parade.”

I’m sitting there belting in the shower, just feeling my whole-body fill with light, with those little tingles of, “Oh my gosh, this is so fun. I love to sing. I love to sing in the shower. I love to sing Broadway music.” And it was this little like lightning bolt of when did I stop doing this?

When did I stop doing this? When did I stop singing Broadway tunes or pop hits in the shower? It felt like it had been a while and my body remembered that feeling the small just burst of joy that it is for me to sing. I started to tick through the different sections of my life in my head and I thought, I have been really dedicated to self-development and to progress and to learning.

And so, I’ve spent a lot of time reading nonfiction books and learning and listening to podcasts. Usually, I’m listening to self-development podcasts or business podcasts. I had a friend mention to me once, a good friend, like a good old friend of mine I think she was feeling a little guilty that she didn’t listen to my podcast.

She said, I just like listening to entertainment. Sometimes it feels like a lot to just be learning all the time. And I was like, Oh yeah, I can kind of see that. And in my head, I was thinking, I don’t totally relate because like I just want to be learning all the time. I want to be absorbing as much great information that will help me in my life as I can.

What do you do JUST FOR FUN?

And this experience of just singing in the shower reminded me that I need to make space for the things that we love, not just the things that help us develop and learn and progress, but for the things that simply satisfy our individual need for pleasure and joy and happiness and humor and satisfaction.

I was telling Dave about this experience, and I was talking through. Just maybe even the last five or six years of my life that I have wanted to focus and like really do well in the things that I was focused on. Which I think is good. This is just, it’s going to be a balancing act here because I want to focus in on the things that I want to do well.

I’ve been focusing on different aspects of my business, narrowed down what I do in my business to the podcast, my in-person events and my course, for many years, you’ve heard in odd jobs, I’ve done all sorts of different things. I grew up as a Jane-of-all-trades and I did handmade things, and I did, different sort of contract gigs here and that fulfills a part of me that I have neglected. I don’t know exactly what this looks like going forward, but I thought, I used to sew all the time and I think it’s okay to move on to hobbies and different seasons of our life.

But I don’t know that I moved on from it because I didn’t like it as much. I think I moved on from it because it didn’t fit into my idea of what I should be spending my time on to be successful in this space, in this business. There’s got to be some sort of balance, some juggle between things that are good for us because they help us in the long term and things that are good for us because they simply help us feel good right now, and they just infuse us with energy and light and joy.

I have lots of different habits and things that I do that do bring me little bursts of daily joy. I mentioned a few of them in my book More Than Enough. I light candles all the time. That’s also going to contribute to this kind of hygge feeling. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more next week as we’re heading into winter.

I lit a fire in our fireplace last night while I was studying, and it felt so cozy and lovely. I often have fresh flowers almost every week. I buy fresh flowers at the grocery store, and so I have fresh flowers in my home all the time. I have delicious per perfume. I surround myself in my home with things that I like.

I try to fill my calendar with things that I want to do, and I’ve shared a lot of that with you over time, and I think that just this experience with the Broadway, for whatever reason, reminded me, lighten up a little bit to not have every single aspect of my life be directed towards something that is improving or progressing or satisfying some specific purpose that fun just for fun’s sake, and maybe that is the actual definition of fun is something that you want to do for its own sake, not because it contributes to something else.

Playing games without feeling like there’s a specific contribution to your family’s overall connection and wellbeing, those things can be wonderful side effects, like secondary purpose is X, Y, Z. But the primary purpose, it doesn’t even matter if we get to the secondary. The primary purpose is just for fun. Just doing something for fun. Because it’s fun because you want to, and maybe a lot of you are listening thinking that’s like what I do all the time. That’s weird that you don’t do that.

Are you caught in adulting?

And maybe there are some of you listening that have got caught in adulting like I might have that have. Yourself stuck in the idea that everything must be done for some higher good. Maybe some of you are feeling the weight of some challenges or obstacles in your life, and on top of that, are feeling the weight of life itself just being heavy because you’re not making space for it to feel light.

In one of my classes. We were discussing positive emotion and the professor posed the question, Is it appropriate to encourage positive emotion during times of trial? And there were a couple examples of like at a funeral. Is it okay to have humor at a funeral or for people to feel like they’re supporting any and connecting with each other? Or should everyone just, feel sad? Is there space for positive emotion in the middle of a trial? If someone has a hard diagnosis? Is there space for humor and for joy and for lightness?

And across the board, every single one of my classmates and I agreed that yes, there absolutely is space in difficult times for lightness, for joy, for happiness, for silliness, for humor. Maybe not all at the same time, and of course, handled in appropriate ways. You don’t want to just like bust. There are inappropriate ways to be, especially like with silliness in a difficult circumstance, you want to tread lightly.

And all of that said, even hard things can be made better. And made easier and made lighter through the invitation of simple, small joys.

Another Small Joy: Smoked Tomato Salsa

Want to hear another example of a small joy? This one you might not totally relate to, but I planted my garden late last year, like in June. So, my tomato plants, which I grow up and over, these indeterminate vining tomato plants. I grow them up and over these arches, iron arches that I had made for my garden.

They were growing. Lots of leaves, lots of little flowers. Finally in like August, they started to fruit, and the fruit was green, and slowly they started to ripen a little at a time. And then because I planted so late, and it’s been. Fairly warm. Where I live in the south, it stays warm.

The days are still like 75 overnights, probably fifties right now, but it’s still warm enough and I had so many fruits like happen all at once. Like the peak of my tomato season was earlier this month, the beginning of October. I finally knowing that it was going to start getting colder at night and it would I don’t know.

I was watching a thing, a gardening Instagram, where she said, I think it’s time if you’re in zone seven, to start pulling out your tomatoes, even the green ones, and let them ripen, off the vine so they don’t get. Hurt in the frost. I don’t know enough, so I guess I’m just telling you that who knows if I needed to pull all my tomatoes down, But I did.

About a week ago, I pulled all the tomatoes down, including the ripe and unripe tomatoes. I ended up with probably 20 pounds of tomatoes. I planted two types this year. For those of you who are interested. I planted Jonah Gold or sun gold, which is one of my very favorites. They’re these tiny, bright orange pops of candy tomatoes. They’re so good. They grow almost like grapes and clusters and they’re delicious.

And then I also planted San Marzano, which I know. Because I always buy San Marzano canned tomatoes. They’re the absolute best sweetest tomatoes. They hail from the San Marzano region in Italy. The ones that you buy in the can that are like official San Marzano tomatoes are grown in that region.

I, of course, don’t live there, but I planted this variety, and they did phenomenally in my yard here in Virginia. So here I am with 20 pounds of tomatoes. I remembered that my dad used to make salsa occasionally, and so I called him and said, Dad, tell me about the salsa you made you used to make. What recipe did you use?

He made salsa and canned it. So, we would have like jars and jars of salsa through the winter that he had made in the summer. He told me that he had just seen a recipe from my friend Susie Bullock from Hey Grill Hey, that was for smoked tomato salsa, and so he gave me all the instructions for how to turn my Weber grill into a smoker, and which I’ve never done before, but it worked out phenomenally.

All of this to say I am. I spent an afternoon, chopping tomatoes, onions, peppers. I had shishitos and bell peppers from my garden as well, and setting up my barbecue to be a smoker, and I started smoking all these vegetables to make this smoked tomato salsa, which spoil alert. It is so good. I will link the recipe in the show notes if you’re interested.

If you have a smoker or. Gas grill like we do, you’ll be able to figure it out so good. But as I’m doing this, I it took about two and a half, maybe three hours, and I it had been a while. Here’s the other thing, I love to cook. I love cooking and baking and like making of fun, elaborate things.

Because of the value that I have on efficiency and planning and getting things done. I had straight away, I don’t remember the last time, maybe it’s since we were in our old house, I don’t remember the last time that I just spent an afternoon. Making something delicious like this and it was a lot of work in a lot of time, and I loved it.

It again, it was like that lightning bolt of reminder of this is something that you love, this is who you are, and it’s okay. Not only okay, but necessary for your joy and your fulfillment and your wellbeing, that you make space for these things in you. I think somehow this is, this episode’s just like a candid confessional.

I think somehow in my last couple years of being intentional and efficient and really valuing progress and purpose, I think somehow inadvertently. I pruned back some of my personal branches of joy. And you know what’s so funny and ironic? I coach people every week about how to. Include these things into their life.

How, especially women, so many of the women that I work with, one of our main focuses is like, what do you love? What lights you up? How do we include those things regularly in your life? I think what I realized these last couple weeks, this last week especially, is that there is a variety and. Particularly my personality I need that variety.

I had zoned in on a couple things and just decided to put those on repeat, ignoring some of the reminders of things that I love just because I love them, things that light up my life just for the sake of lighting up my life. Re inclusion of singing Broadway tunes in the shower and spending three hours smoking tomatoes for salsa made this week.

One of my favorite weeks that I can remember in this recent history. Simply adding back into the mix, doing some things just for fun, just because I love them with no. Tying them back to any other particular goal or idea or future plan or progress I’m trying to make, I’m not planning on becoming a Broadway singer, but I love to sing in the shower and I’m going to start doing it more, and I stopped listening to, I’m not going to tell you to stop listening to my podcast, but I stopped turning on a, an educational podcast everywhere that I went when I was walking or driving the car and replace some of that time, the transportation time with listening to songs I could just sing along to.

Sometimes we get in the habit of doing something that’s good for us and forget that there are also other things that are good for us in different ways. So, whether this exact scenario, I’m guessing this exact scenario that you’re like, Oh yeah, I love show tunes too, and I need to start singing them again.

I don’t know if that’s going to apply to many of you listening, the reminder of this week is just to give yourself some space to do something that you love for its own sake. It doesn’t have to all make sense. You’re not too old to love the things that you love. And if you have a hard time remembering what those things are, think about things you used to love.

What did you love in junior high or high school? What were your favorite things? Maybe you need to turn on some spice Girls. Maybe it’s, do you know that whole Backstreet Boys dance? I don’t. But I have friends from high school that know that whole Backstreet Boys dance. Maybe this week you need to turn on that song and do that freaking dance…the Bye Bye One. You know the one I’m talking about. I don’t know it. I should learn it. Maybe I should learn it. That’s the other thing I thought of. I love to dance. It’s been so long since I danced. I danced in the kitchen occasionally with my kids, but maybe I need to sign up for a dance class or maybe I just need to turn on some music and like jam sometime.

I wish Alison Faulkner was still having her adult dance parties, because that seems like it’d be a fun place to go. Let it all hang out., whatever you’re thinking about for you as you’ve listened to this episode and listened to me just like word vomit, all the weird things that have been going through my brain this last week.

I want you to consider what has come to mind for you and write it down. What is something that you want to get back in touch with, something that you used to love, that you haven’t done for a while, something that you know lights you up that you haven’t created space for and give it some space. Lindsay Rush says in her poem, Why shouldn’t I use my expensive face cream with abandon / Triple text my crush / Sing at the top of my lungs while I vacuum / Buy the orange chair/ Paint the town purple / And fly across the country for a weekend just to pinch a cheek /Turn the music up /Give the dog a piece of cheese / Sing Broadway tunes in the shower / Roast the tomatoes.

Do the thing that brings you joy. And see how that increase in positive emotion, that burst of energy, that reminder of who you are and that what you love matters can lighten up the mood of the rest of your life.

Even when things are hard and heavy, even when things are tricky and unexpected, that lightning bolt reminder of what you love. Has the capacity to lighten everything up for a while. I hope that this episode has been a good reminder for some of you, if not all of you, to just tap back into that lightness and that joy and do things that you love for their own sake.

I am looking forward to continuing to just let myself go a little bit. I don’t consider myself a super serious person. Even I have needed the reminder to just lighten up to enjoy the moments as they. And not put too much concern on where this is all going all the time. I’m so glad you’ve chosen to add Live creative podcast to your day.

I hope that you feel a little bit better than you did before and I wish you a beautiful joy filled week. I’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.