On my flight to visit my parents, while writing in my journal, I discovered something uncomfortable.
To some extent, many of us are living in fear — myself included.
Not dramatic, movie-villain fear.
Just ordinary, everyday fear. The kind that quietly hums in the background.
Fear that things may not work out.
Fear that even if they do, they may still go wrong later.
Fear that our loved ones’ health may decline.
Fear that we may not know how to help when it does.
Fear that our children may not grow into responsible adults because they forgot their homework and apparently every promise they made last week.
Fear that the teenage years may be even harder than the current years.
You know. The usual.
The brain insists on running a full-time risk management office.
To be fair, I work in transformation. Risk registers have probably become a personality trait.
So during a four-day break, I spent some time writing notes and asking myself a simple question:
What does it mean to live in joy instead of fear?
I ended up with four lessons.
To Live in Joy Is to Work on It, Not Fix It
The first realization hit me hard.
I am proud of being a problem solver.
Unfortunately, that may be part of the problem.
When your identity is built around solving problems, you start seeing everything as a problem. A difficult project. An unclear report. A delayed task. Something to fix.
But perhaps that is not the right lens.
Life is not a machine waiting to be repaired.
Neither is work.
Life’s natural state is messy, incomplete, and occasionally annoying.
The goal is not to fix life.
The goal is to work on it.
Working on it means accepting reality as it is, acknowledging our feelings, and taking the next step.
Fixing it often means fighting reality, blaming ourselves or someone else, and demanding immediate results.
The difference is subtle.
One creates compassion.
The other creates frustration.
The problem with “fixing” life is that the queue never ends.
As long as life continues, there will always be one problem after another. That’s a sure thing.
If we only celebrate when everything is fixed, the day will never come.
Every day becomes frustration, shame, and anger.
If we are willing to work on things, every small step becomes worth celebrating.
Any baby step is a celebration.
To Live in Joy Is to Live Here and Now
Time travels from yesterday to today and then tomorrow.
That is true for everyone.
But joy lives here and now, not yesterday and not tomorrow.
If we cannot enjoy here and now, how can we claim we will be happy tomorrow?
If we keep replaying decisions already made, choices already chosen, and tasks already completed, we are arguing with history.
Let history be history.
Let the future be future.
The focal points are:
The person in front of us.
The task at hand.
The moment we are having.
These are the only places where joy can actually exist.
Everything else is imagination.
A quote from a short drama I watched with my husband stayed with me:
If we do not know the result, the result is the most important.
If we know the result, the process is the most important.
If we do not care about the result, here and now is the most important.
To Live in Joy Is to Accept What Could Have Been
Think about the most memorable love story you have ever watched.
Chances are, it wasn’t a perfect story.
It was bittersweet.
Titanic is not memorable because everyone lived happily ever after.
It is memorable because they didn’t.
To live in joy is to learn to discover, accept, and perhaps even enjoy the bittersweet beauty of life.
The beauty of what could have been.
The beauty of incompleteness.
The key is not to dwell on regret or endlessly replay alternative versions of life.
It is to accept the current version of life — gently holding it without trying to change it.
Bitterness and sweetness arrive together.
They are sold as a package.
If we enjoy bittersweet stories on screen, perhaps we can learn to appreciate them in our own lives too.
After all, we are both the directors and actors of the most authentic story we will ever experience — our life story.
Maybe the goal is not to make our story perfect.
Maybe the goal is to make it the best bittersweet story we can.
To Live in Joy Is to Be Comfortable Being Ordinary
This may be the hardest lesson.
Ordinary people find joy in ordinary things.
Food.
Wine.
A good joke.
Sabotaging someone in a board game.
A family dinner with parents complaining about this or that.
Finishing a household chore that nobody will ever notice.
Ordinary parents lose their patience.
Ordinary kids procrastinate.
Ordinary leaders do not always have the answers.
Ordinary workers disagree and occasionally fight.
Ordinary people try their best and still discover that life has other plans.
The uncomfortable truth is that 90% of us are ordinary 90% of the time.
The even more uncomfortable truth is that this is perfectly fine.
Being comfortable with being ordinary means accepting that even when we give 100% (there is no such thing as above 100% 🙂), things may still not work out. The 1% or 10% of extraordinary outcomes often come with a healthy dose of luck — and it is completely okay to pray for it.
Sometimes results are flat.
Sometimes progress is slow.
Sometimes life shrugs and says, “Not today.”
And that’s okay.
Good enough is often good enough.
And then move on.
So that is what I learned over a long weekend.
Work on it. Don’t fix it.
Be here and now.
Accept what could have been.
And be comfortable being ordinary.
Most days, that’s enough.
I am quite certain I will still have fears tomorrow.
Probably before breakfast.
The point is not to have no fear.
The point is not to let fear do all the living.
Ontransformation.org 
Leave a comment