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November 19 - December 30, 2019
“joy,” they mean an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion, one that can be recognized by certain telltale signs: smiling, laughing, and a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. While contentment is curled up on the sofa, and bliss is lost in tranquil meditation, joy is skipping, jiving, twirling, giggling. It is a uniquely exuberant emotion, a high-energy form of happiness.
the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color.
Matisse’s light, bright palette makes an ideal choice for color inspiration, but other artists I often look at include Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaunay, Pierre Bonnard, and, of course, David Hockney.
We’ve all been told we should dress for the job we want. But what about dressing for the joy we want?
“People don’t know they should be looking for three thousand degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with four thousand or five thousand degrees Kelvin, which is cool light.” This information is printed on packages, but most people don’t know to look for it.
Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful.
It’s a process of removing the background noise to create a canvas on which to build a joyful home. Yet it’s also worth remembering that just weeding alone doesn’t create a beautiful garden. You have to plant flowers, too.
“More is more and less is a bore.”
small things repeated many times create a burst of joy much bigger than each individual piece could.
Rainbows are so intensely joyful, just a faint, thin band of one can transform the sky, stopping a crowd of people in their tracks. A rainbow is the perfect fusion of energy and abundance aesthetics, a plethora of photons zinging around together. It’s hard to think of anything that can’t be made more joyful by a rush of rainbow color.
Minimalists tout the idea that nature builds with perfect thrift, when in fact the evidence of her extravagance is everywhere. In what economical world does a fruit fly perform dances or a moose carry a coat rack on its head? Spectacles that require a substantial investment of energy—colorful patterns or exuberant movements—demonstrate that an organism is vigorous enough to afford such a lavish expenditure.
the word “gaudy” has roots in the Latin gaudere, “to rejoice” or “delight” in something, which happens to be the same root that gave us the word “joy.” Choosing abundance is not a moral failing. It’s an expression of deep, human delight. It’s an acknowledgment that we are here to do more than eke out an existence between birth and death and chores.
Joy thrives on the alleviation of constraints.
Get to know your space first. Rather than walking into a store and choosing any plant that catches your eye, figure out which direction your windows face and whether you have mostly direct or indirect sunlight. Then pick a plant that will be happy in those conditions.
Order isn’t dull and staid. It is a tangible manifestation of a vibrant harmony, of disparate parts working in concert to sustain the graceful balance of life.
“Notice how groups of small objects, when they are well arranged, become important and effective.” She
Cathleen McCandless, a no-nonsense feng shui practitioner whose book, Feng Shui That Makes Sense,
Chi is the circulation of air in a space, the movement of a gaze around a room, the daily orbits of a home’s inhabitants. Chi is flow.
Play is one of our greatest means of accessing delight, with deep roots in human life.
But the only metric of success for play is how much joy it produces.
a psychological quirk known as peak shift effect, which can lead us to respond to an exaggerated stimulus even more strongly than the real thing.
“Why to be serious do things have to look serious?”
Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
By hiding delightful things for ourselves and others to discover, we become a bit like squirrels, caching joy so that we can reap its rewards at a future date. Our world becomes layered. It contains joys that can be seen and others that lie just below the surface of everyday life. And with each joy we uncover, we are reminded that we are the architects of our own delight, the makers of our own luck.
Le Corbusier: “The home should be the treasure chest of living.”
While good taste wants things to be simple and normal, joy thrives out on the edges of the bell curve. This is a different manifestation of the surprise aesthetic, one that disrupts our expectations of how things should look and behave. It has a rebellious insouciance,
The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it! I had a sort of wild desire to invest in a bit of real estate on one of the planets. All sense of depression and hard times vanished, I felt like being frivolous with the stars. For Keller,
Research has found that gaining elevation can lead us to focus more on the big picture and less on the details of a situation.
By using light colors and sheer fabrics, leggy furnishings and translucent accessories, we can bring some of the lightness of the sky down to earth.
Recognizing that we can find transcendence in our surroundings liberates the sacred and allows us to rediscover our connection to it, regardless of what we believe.
“If you expect that there’s a silver lining,” he says, “you’ll look for it.”
Yet what I learned in Iceland is that scientific knowledge doesn’t always preclude magical interpretation. Even if we understand the logic behind the magnetic disturbance of the aurora or the geothermal cauldron of the hot springs, encountering them in certain circumstances can open a gap between our cognitive understanding and the sensory reality before us. Into this gap, magic flows.
“The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?”
Oscar Wilde: THE SECRET OF LIFE IS TO APPRECIATE THE PLEASURE OF BEING TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY DECEIVED.
At the root of our love of rainbows, comets, and fireflies is a small reservoir of belief that the world is bigger and more amazing than we ever dreamed it could be.
As Mark Twain put it, “Grief takes care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with.”
interview. “It’s happy. It makes you look like you’re up for a good time.”
Put simply, big things express big joy.
At the heart of celebration is a kind of mathematical paradox: the more we share joy, the more it grows. The implication of this is that we should manage joy in the exact opposite way that we manage money. We should spend it all, at every chance we get. What celebration does, with music and fireworks, giant balloons and glitter, is broadcast our joy far and wide so that others can join in. Because the more generous we are with our joy, the more we have for ourselves.
