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

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

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

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.

Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful.

Studies have also found that exposure to indoor plants and even just the color green can help free the mind, increasing creativity.

In a related test, researchers used a humidifier to infuse hotel rooms with essential oils from the hinoki cypress, a tree common in Japan’s forests. Just the presence of phytoncides in the air was enough to decrease stress hormones and raise NK cell activity.

Disorderly environments have been linked to feelings of powerlessness, fear, anxiety, and depression, and they exert a subtle, negative influence on people’s behavior.

In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.

If your door sticks or you’re always tripping over shoes, then you’re going to find friction at a moment when you really want momentum. This is mental, but it is physical, too. Instead of flowing smoothly out of the house in the morning, your body will absorb the force from that friction. This might make you grit your teeth or tense your muscles, which in turn might influence the way you handle traffic on your commute or how you greet your coworkers when you arrive at the office. It’s a small moment that can have knock-on effects throughout your day. The same thing happens in reverse when you come home at night. Entering your home through a patch of chaos creates a moment of irritation that affects the rest of your evening.

According to Gallops, whenever one partner faces greater resistance than the other when going about their daily activities, an imbalance is created in the home.

I thought back to Pesce’s opening question: “Why to be serious do things have to look serious?” I believe we unconsciously abide by this principle because our notion of work is rooted in an industrial economy that values efficiency and structure at the expense of joy and creativity.

Stuart Brown observes, the separation of work and play is a false construct. “The opposite of play is not work,” he often says. “It’s depression.”

The poet Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Ruth Lande Shuman, the founder of the nonprofit Publicolor, which paints New York City schools with vibrant hues, put it this way: “I think many of us hide behind an idea of good taste,” she said, “because we’re afraid to really be ourselves.”

The contradictions inherent in the unexpected welcome trigger what psychologists call a need for accommodation. Surprises puncture our worldview, forcing us to reconcile new information with previously held beliefs.

Other studies have shown that positive affect makes people less likely to cling to an initial hypothesis when presented with conflicting evidence. This suggests that joyful surprises might help disrupt harmful stereotypes, increasing the chances that we’ll see difference as delightful, rather than threatening.

All children live in a world rich with surprises. Each new thing, no matter how ordinary, inspires a sense of wonder and delight. But novelty naturally declines with age, and our surroundings begin to dull with familiarity. Psychologists call this phenomenon hedonic adaptation.

Lakoff and Johnson assert that because the physical experience of joy and well-being has an upward quality, upwardness has become a metaphor for positivity in our lives.

I heard in this idea an echo of Pete Nelson and his observation that the intensity of daily life eases with a brief escape to higher elevation.

But what to do if you wish you could live in a house of air instead of one made of brick or stone? I thought back to that Chinese study, where just looking at pictures of balloons and rocks created an unconscious priming effect, and it reminded me of a concept designers call visual weight. Visual weight describes how heavy things look to our eye, and it doesn’t always correlate to the actual mass of an object. For example, light colors have less visual weight than dark ones. Translucent materials appear lighter than those that are opaque, and slender objects appear lighter than bulky ones. Negative space is also tied to visual weight, so objects with perforations or spaces appear lighter than solid ones. Knowing this, we can imagine ways to create a space that borrows some of the lightness we find in bubbles or clouds. 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.

“Awe transcends our understanding of the world,” says Keltner, who has led much of the research on awe over the last fifteen years and has been a guiding force for how emotions show up in popular culture, advising companies like Facebook on their “Reactions” feature and Pixar on the film Inside Out.

Psychologists who study paranormal and religious beliefs have observed that people who believe in magic tend to find more pleasure in other aspects of their lives, while those who don’t can suffer from anhedonia: an inability to enjoy life at all.

We are living at a moment when technology is redefining our world at an unprecedented rate, creating more opportunities to be dazzled but with a greater risk of fatigue. Our best defense is to maintain a juxtaposition between the high tech and the mundane. Technology is most magical when it reminds us of the boundaries of our existence, even as it shatters them.

English writer Eden Phillpotts once wrote, “The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them.

suddenly didn’t feel so alone. “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” wrote the German novelist Berthold Auerbach,

Finding a closer relationship to the cycles of the earth is often as simple as reconnecting with nature. The farm-to-table and local-food movements bring a greater awareness of growing cycles to the dinner table, offering up the joy of discovering heirloom variants overlooked by the food industry and the delight of learning to anticipate the brief, intense seasons of our favorite produce.

One of my favorite houseplants is a black oxalis, a relative of the shamrock, with purple leaves that open each morning to greet the day and close up in the evening when the sun sets.

Many of these spirals exhibit a rate of expansion that correlates with the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematically significant group of numbers in which each is the sum of the preceding two (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55). Dividing successive Fibonacci numbers yields a ratio known as the golden mean (approximately 1.61803), which some historians believe was used by the ancient Egyptians in the design of the Pyramids at Giza and by the ancient Greeks in the Parthenon.

Joy evolved for the express purpose of helping to steer us toward conditions that would encourage us to flourish. It is our inner guide to the things that animate, stimulate, and sustain us. Put more simply, joy is what makes life worth living. And yet for some reason, we have decided that it is superfluous—the icing on the cake, rather than an integral part of the cake itself. We sort our lives neatly into buckets of needs and wants, and even though joy’s origins lie in highlighting what is essential for our survival, it has come to signify the ultimate luxury, an extra we allow ourselves only if all our needs are met. The problem is that without joy, we may be surviving, but we are not thriving. If we rarely laugh or play, if we never have glimpses of magic or flashes of transcendence or bursts of celebration, then no matter how well fed and comfortable we are, we are not truly alive.

Once we accepted the notion that joy is inessential, it became easy for it to slip out of the center of our lives. Work became about endless gains in productivity, rather than the joy of craft or creation. School became a push for achievement, rather than an exploration or an adventure. Systematically, joy was squeezed out of the places where we spend most of our days. And the same thing happened to our physical environment. Buildings presented themselves as canvases for the display of status or ideology or brand identity, rather than spaces for the cultivation of joy. As joy moved to the edges of our world, to playgrounds and beaches, nature preserves and candy stores, the rest of the world was left to languish.

The lesson of renewal is that from small seeds big things grow. And though I never would have suspected it eight years ago when I started writing this book, it’s not far-fetched to believe that from the seeds of our own joy, a whole world can be reborn.