Foreboding joy.
It’s a thing. Maybe you’ve never heard of it before, but I bet you’ve experienced it.
It’s that feeling when you are so blissfully happy, and then you have a moment…
“oh crap, this can’t possibly last”
Like watching your kids sleeping, enjoying their absolute perfection. And then in the next second imagining some awful tragedy happening to them (I know i’m not the only weirdo who has done this!).
We were talking about this topic on our leader call this morning - how you can’t have joy without loss, and you can’t have loss without joy. When we are afraid of loss and allow it to drive our lives, we lose out on experiencing joy.
Brené Brown writes about this far more eloquently in one of her books that I can’t remember right now…however, the point is clear! If we want to be able to experience joy without the paralyzing fear of it being taken away, practice gratitude.
It’s so simple it seems like it won’t work. But it does. It might not happen overnight (in fact, it took about 4 months for me to truly feel a different), but when you practice daily gratitude…life and your mindset truly do change.
My advice if you’re starting out with a gratitude practice is to start with just writing down 10 things you are grateful for every morning. It can range from the simple to the profound, it doesn’t matter, it just matters that you get into a place of intentionally thinking about gratitude at the start of every day.
You up for the challenge?!