I've been thinking a lot lately about something Christiane Northrup said in her immensely inspiring CD, The Power of Joy. While many of her points are so insightful - I cannot recommend this CD enough - the words that struck me the most were, "Everyone's going to die, but not everyone is going to live."
In a world where we run around with to do lists as long as our arm, trying so hard to achieve everything, we have left little room for an actual life. We've become too busy to enjoy our lives. We run around multitasking and trying to, "have it all," until we're just too damn tired to remember what the "all" was. We jam more into one day than our Grandparents did in a week until we end up running our cars into a pole because we're texting and driving at the same time.
Christiane Northrup goes on to say that if we don't make room in our lives for joy, it will be demanded of us in other ways. We will re-route the pleasure that we seek into a behavior or pattern that is far less nurturing like addiction - drugs, sex, food, work or the more subtle one, the busy adrenaline high. Even in our down times we find it hard to do just one thing. Our leisure time has been co-opted by multitasking. In a world where technology has delivered social networking to the end of our fingertips, we've never been so isolated. People walk down the street with their eyes riveted to their social devices barely looking up to acknowledge that another person has passed. We have walled ourselves off into a private space that defeats the desire that it initially strove to fulfill - interaction with another.
We've put pleasure on the back burner in order to earn enough, to do enough, to be enough in order to enjoy that pleasure that we seek. When all is said and done the most gratifying moments are the ones that we've had all along, time with our friends and loved ones. That interaction is so gratifying that we vow to do it again soon so we pull out our Blackberry's to try to fit it into our lives. At our fingertips is the love, joy and closeness we seek but we put it last on our "to do" list. How did we ever think that being busy would buy us those times we cherish the most? As Abraham explains, you cannot get to a happy end through unhappy means, it defies law. It's faulty problem solving at best and yet here we are. What now?
We were born to seek joy and we simply must build more of it into our days, our moments, our lives. We don't want to come to the end of our lives, and none of us knows when that could be, and say that we were too busy to enjoy it. It's like that old adage about how we're not going to regret the fact that we didn't spend more time at the office. If we make a small effort to include moments of joy into our lives, it will pay huge dividends. That time we set aside, even to laugh, becomes very attractive in the world of vibration. We will begin to attract more moments like that and then our aspect, as Buddhism would say, shifts and we are different. When consciousness shifts, even the slightest bit, we have set off a tsunami of change that will change us and our world. It's worth the small commitment. It's worth the time. It will be the most enjoyable effort you make. Make time to laugh, to connect with another, to offer a kind word or compliment, to smile at the stranger that passes you on the street. Joy is what we seek. Make time for it. It will pay big dividends when we put it at the top of our "To Do" list.
I leave you with a brilliant rant from the women who inspired this post, Dr. Christiane Northrup. "Every thought you think creates a cascade of biochemical changes in your body that are measurable. And every cell in your body communicates instantly with every other cell in your body; and, believe it or not, communicates with every cell in my body. And I'm thinking that the energy shift we do tonight (inciting joy) is the best hope for the war in Iraq, peace on the planet, cleaning up all kinds of pollution - that's what we're doing...this is the only thing that will change anything."
