Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

How do tangible things create an intangible feeling of joy?

Joy isn’t hard to find at all. In fact, it’s all around us.

They weren’t joyful for just a few people. They were joyful for nearly everyone.

though the feeling of joy is mysterious and ephemeral, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes.

Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves

Joy’s power is that small moments can spark big changes. A whimsical outfit might prompt a smile, which inspires a chance kindness toward a stranger, which helps someone who is struggling to get through her day. Even the tiniest joyful gestures add up over time, and before we know it, we have not just a few happier people but a truly joyful world.

“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.

I realized that energy is all around us, all the time.

the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color.

While the symbolic meanings of different colors vary across cultures, it seems that brightness is a dimension universally understood to be joyful.

Color is energy made visible. It activates an ancient circuit that lights up with pleasure at the idea of finding something sweet to eat. Now, in a world that contains rainbows of artificial colors, we still feel the same joy, even if a colorful object contains no physical nourishment. More broadly, color is an indication of the richness of our surroundings. It is an unconscious signal not only of immediate sustenance but of an environment that is capable of sustaining us over time.

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.

“Arakawa and Gins believed that architecture has an effect on the body like medicine,” he said. “So, like medicine, they made instructions.”

synaptic pruning.

We are here, as Diane Ackerman writes, to live not just the length of our lives, but the width of them as well.

And while teachers sometimes worry that windows in a classroom will be distracting to schoolchildren, it turns out that nature views actually improve students’ attention while also decreasing stress.

(A startling measure of our online addiction: one in ten Americans admit to checking their phones even during sex!)

a new kind of environmentalism, one that is rooted not in obligation but in joy.

The expressions on people’s faces were beatific.

(What is a rainbow, after all, but an organized set of colors?)

Just as we have an intuitive eye for vertical and horizontal symmetry, our eyes also unconsciously gravitate toward the center of an object or a space.

“The need to play is in us,” he said after we’d gotten settled, “and if we don’t do it, we’re in trouble.”

Play seems to have its own physical language.

Aesthetically, the story of childhood is the story of the circle and the sphere.

We can court enchantment by bringing ourselves closer to the mysteries that surround us.

THE SECRET OF LIFE IS TO APPRECIATE THE PLEASURE OF BEING TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY DECEIVED.

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,”

Out of ends, renewal creates beginnings. Out of destruction, creation.

nothing is irredeemable in this world, nothing so ruined that it is ever beyond hope.

The problem is that without joy, we may be surviving, but we are not thriving.

We need to bring joy back into the heart of our lives. We need to bring our world back to life.