What You Wish For

by Katherine Center

His whole philosophy was, Never miss a chance to celebrate. He celebrated everybody else all the time.

Pay attention to the things that connect you with joy.”

“It’s one of the secrets to life that no one ever tells you. Joy cures everything.” I flared my nostrils. “Everything?” I challenged, pointing at the bandage over my stitches. “Everything emotional,” Max clarified. “I don’t think you can cure emotions,” I said. But Max just nodded. “Joy is an antidote to fear. To anger. To boredom. To sorrow.” “But you can’t just decide to feel joyful.” “True. But you can decide to do something joyful.”

“It’s not about fixing all your problems, anyway,” Max said. “You’ll never fix all your problems.” “Well, that’s encouraging.” “The point is to be happy anyway. As often as you can.”

“courage makes everything easier next time. And I’m not going to let you live your life in fear.”

“It’s a choice,” I went on, feeling like I needed to make him see. “A choice to value the good things that matter. A choice to rise above everything that could pull you down. A choice to look misery right in the eyes … and then give it the finger.”

“It’s a deliberate kind of joy. It’s a conscious kind of joy. It’s joy on purpose.”

But that’s the thing about joy. You don’t have to wait for it to happen. You can make it happen.

it was always better to dance than to refuse.

Terrible things happen all the time. That doesn’t mean you live your life in fear.”

The world keeps hanging on to this idea that love is for the gullible. But nothing could be more wrong. Love is only for the brave.

“Life doesn’t ever give you what you want just the way you want it. Life doesn’t ever make things easy. How dare you demand that happiness should be yours without any sacrifice—without any courage? What an incredibly spoiled idea—that anything should come easy? Love makes you better because it’s hard. Taking risks makes you better because it’s terrifying. That’s how it works. You’ll never get anything that matters without earning it. And even what you get”—she lifted her chin in defiance—“you won’t get to keep. Joy is fleeting. Nothing lasts. That’s exactly what courage is. Knowing all that going in—and going in anyway.”

We made a choice to do joy on purpose. Not in spite of life’s sorrows. But because of them.

More and more I feel like joy is cumulative—that the more of it you notice, and pay attention to, and savor, and remember, the more there suddenly is all around you.

So part of living a happier life is training yourself to notice the joy that’s already there, and another part of it is working to create more of it in your life. I’m endlessly fascinated by joy because being happy has never come easily to me. It’s something I work at consciously. But working at it works!

Reading for joy is about learning to decide for yourself what a good story is for you at any given moment in your life—and letting joy be your guide. Because if a story captivates, delights, or just works for you, that’s a good story. Period.