Let me tell you about an experience that happened to me recently. In late August, I walked into the Drepung Gomang Center for Engaging Compassion, just down the street from my home in Louisville, Kentucky for an event called Cultivating Joy and Wonder through Mindfulness and Meditation.
Guys, I pass by this place on the way to work every single day and I’ve actually spent some meditative time in the prayer room. Yet, this was the first time I signed up and attended anything more “formal”. The center is an amazing place. It sits quietly in the neighborhood and, without much apparent notice, offers Tibetan Buddhist teachings, meditation, compassion education, and interfaith programming. It’s a special place that I think many people in Louisville overlook. The center’s mission is helping people develop skills in compassion, meditation, and nonviolence—skills for living well in a really noisy world. I think we could all benefit from fine tuning those skills. Don’t you agree?
That night’s session was led by Jenny Bell, an earth poet, artist, mindful self-compassion mentor, and certified mindfulness meditation instructor who has been leading circles, workshops, and retreats in our community for years.
I had never met Jenny before walking into her class. But, almost immediately, I connected with her energy. She was warm, grounded, funny, and deeply thoughtful. She’s pretty cool. You should definitely follow along on her social media pages.
I into the class that day already noodling on one particular question:
What really is joy?
That sounds simple, right? Yeah… it isn’t.
We throw the word “joy” around all the time in the course of our everyday lives, but what are we actually talking about? In my experience, happiness and joy are usually treated as synonyms… but, upon deeper reflection, I don’t think they should be.
Happiness is often circumstantial.
- A job promotion.
- A fancy vacation.
- A really good meal.
- A new house.
- Our favorite team winning the championship.
- Something going our way.
But, joy just feels… different. It’s somehow deeper and less dependent on everything cooperating. It feels like a more settled sense of contentment, meaning, gratitude, connection, and internal well-being.
Happiness says:.
“This is good, so I feel good”.
Joy seems to say:
“Life’s complicated, imperfect, sometimes painful—and yet there’s still something here worth smiling about.“
On The Story of Us: From Cosmic Dawn to the Depths of Being, I usually ask my guests some version of the same question:
How do you find moments of joy in your everyday life?
What continues to surprise me is how rarely their answers have anything to do with some grand achievement. Almost nobody says: “My greatest joy comes from finally reaching the next milestone.” No.
They talk about their kids. Or walking along the beach at sunset. Music. Noticing a wildflower growing in the driveway crack. A morning prayer ritual. A quiet evening sitting on the porch. Watching a bird land on a fence.
You know, “ordinary stuff”.
Which brings me back to something Jenny said that night that and I wrote down:
You don’t find joy. You build it in small, meaningful moments.
I love that because it changes joy from something we wait for into something we practice. Jenny’s class was built around precisely that idea. She invited us to slow down, notice, savor, and explore how present-moment awareness can cultivate gratitude, awe, wonder, and flourishing—even in mundane or difficult seasons.
Not after life becomes perfect.
Right.
Now.
The Moments We Keep Missing
One of Jenny’s ideas that really captured me was the importance of noticing what she described as moments of neutrality.
Not every moment is wonderful. But most moments aren’t all that terrible either. And still, we kind of tend to ignore the neutral ones.
- The cup of coffee tastes…fine.
- The traffic moves along smoothly.
- The shower’s warm.
- The dog is sleeping at your feet.
- The person you love is sitting in the next room.
- Your body is simultaneously doing thousands of things correctly without your help.
- The sun peeks through the kitchen window.
Nothing extraordinary is happening… and maybe that’s exactly the point.
We’re conditioned to notice and respond quickly to disruption. Our brains are really good at this. Something goes wrong and suddenly it occupies the entire stage.
- A frustrating email arrives.
- Someone cuts us off in traffic. <cue middle finger>
- A meeting goes badly.
- An unexpected bill pops up in the mailbox.
- Someone says something annoying
And the mind says:
Hey! Pay Attention! This is the story now.
But in the meantime, forty small things may have gone perfectly fine and we hardly even register them.
Maybe, “cultivating joy” begins by correcting that imbalance? Not by pretending everything is glorious. Not by manufacturing some false sense of gratitude.
Just by simply noticing more accurately and acutely that:
There’s more going right than we tend to see.
That feels connected to mindfulness in its most practical form:
Pay attention to what is actually happening—not only to what your anxious mind is shouting about.
Joy Has Special Ingredients
Ok, that night, I learned that cultivating joy isn’t exactly like baking the perfect banana bread, but there is a recipe for it. Jenny offered us a beautiful collection of things that contribute to joy when mixed together:
- Gratitude.
- Curiosity.
- Learning.
- Serendipity.
- Generosity of spirit.
- Service.
- Purpose.
My college professors would be proud. I took copious notes. Jenny’s list of ingredients could almost be the curriculum for A Meaningful Life: 101. And none of them require money. None require social status. None require that followers on Instagram “like” us.
- Curiosity keeps the world from becoming stale.
- Learning reminds us we are forever unfinished.
- Serendipity asks us to leave enough room in our lives for something magical to happen.
- Generosity shifts our attention away from the endless project of becoming ourselves.
- Service reminds us that meaning often appears when we become useful to someone else.
- Purpose gives us direction without requiring certainty.
- And gratitude changes the lens through which we view what is already here.
This is one of the recurring truths I keep encountering through The Story of Us Project.
Human beings often believe meaning is something we must seek to discover.
Out there in the wilderness of the world,
But…
So much of what we’re searching for emerges from how we relate to the life smack dab in front of us.
Stress Is Resistance to What Is
Another simple statement Jenny shared was:
Stress is resistance to what “IS”.
Let that marinate for a few minutes. It’s been on repeat in my mind ever since. Obviously, stress can be real, physiological, overwhelming, and it’s a necessary part of our life.
But, there’s usually another layer of stress that we manufacture all on our own.
Reality says: This happened. The mind says: This shouldn’t have happened.
Reality says: This person is behaving this way. The mind says: They should be different.
Reality says: The plan has changed. The mind says: That just can’t be.
We start pushing back against not just the problem, but the very existence of the problem. Jenny shared a simple reminder for those moments:
It ain’t perfect.
It ain’t personal.
It’ ain’t permanent.
All right, maybe not those words exactly but you get the gist. Those words have become written on a little mental flash card I carry around in my pocket now.
It’s not perfect. Of course it isn’t – it never was meant to be
It’s not personal. Not every inconvenience is an insult directed at me.
And it’s not permanent. This too shall pass.
Everything is impermanent. Pleasure is impermanent. Pain is impermanent. Success is impermanent. Our physical bodies are impermanent
Nothing agrees to stay exactly as we prefer it to be and a lot of suffering seems to come from us constantly asking it to.
Acceptance Is Not Surrender
Another lesson Jenny taught us is the very important distinction between acceptance and allowance.
Acceptance doesn’t mean becoming passive roadkill.
It doesn’t mean letting people walk over you or endorsing injustice or remaining in unhealthy relationships or pretending hurtful behavior is acceptable.
Not at all.
Acceptance simply means: This is what is happening. That’s very different from thinking: I must therefore tolerate it forever.
- You can accept that someone behaves a certain way and still establish a boundary.
- You can accept that a relationship has changed and still grieve it.
- You can accept a diagnosis and still pursue treatment.
- You can accept that you made a mistake and still change direction.
Acceptance says:
I’m no longer wasting energy arguing with the fact that this moment exists.
My wife Jessica and I have a saying we use often – “it is what it is”. That can sound like accepting defeat. Jenny’s version feels more like clarity. Seeing reality accurately and then deciding how you want to meet it.
That’s a much stronger posture.
Awe Hiding in Plain Sight
The topic that night was about cultivating joy, but it was also about wonder.
That word keeps popping up in my podcast conversations and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I keep coming back to the idea that aging, at its very best, may not be about becoming less interested in life.
Maybe it’s about becoming interested in smaller parts of it.
- A bird.
- A shadow.
- The rain.
- A hand written note.
- A stranger holding a door.
- The sound of your children laughing in another room.
- The person you’ve been married to for decades sitting across the table doing something completely ordinary.
Mindfulness doesn’t make these things more miraculous. It makes us more available to the miracle that was already there.
Jenny’s workshop reminded me that awe doesn’t require a vacation to the Grand Canyon. Wonder isn’t reserved for standing under the Milky Way with a powerful telescope.
Sometimes wonder is hidden in what we’ve stopped looking at because we see it every single day.
What I took away from my time with Jenny was that joy grows exactly in that spot. It just takes maintaining a childlike since of wonder to notice it.
The Question I Keep Asking
I don’t know how many podcast guests I’ve asked this of now:
How do you find moments of joy in your everyday life?
I think maybe I’ve been asking the question slightly wrong. Perhaps joy isn’t something we find. Maybe Jenny is right.
We cultivate it.
- We practice attention.
- We remain curious.
- We serve others.
- We notice.
- We express gratitude.
- We leave room for surprise.
- We stop requiring ordinary life to become extraordinary before we agree to appreciate it.
We learn to say:
This moment isn’t perfect and it may not even be particularly exciting. But here I am, and there’s something magical happening.
Most of our lives aren’t made up of monumental moments.
They’re made of Tuesdays. Meals. Car rides. Text messages. Errands. Mornings. Goodbyes. Small kindnesses and unremarkable sunsets we barely look at.
If joy is only available to us in the exceptional moments, we’re gonna miss out on an enormous portion of our lives. We’re gonna sleepwalk through the “moments of neutrality” and wake up one day wondering where the time went.
But if joy can be cultivated inside ordinary experience? Ah…then suddenly there’s a lot more of it available.
A Small Practice
So here’s an invitation. Today, notice three things you would normally overlook.
Not spectacular things. Neutral things. Then pause. Just long enough to realize:
This is part of my life too.
Not only the problems. Not only the deadlines. Not only the next destination.
This.
And when stress arrives, try Jenny’s three reminders:
It’s not perfect.
It’s not personal.
It’s not permanent.
Then ask: What does this moment actually require of me? Not what do I wish were happening. Not what should have happened.
What is happening and how do I want to meet it?
Maybe that’s mindfulness. Maybe that’s acceptance. And maybe, practiced often enough, that’s how joy gets cultivated.
One small moment at a time.
If these kinds of questions resonate with you, I’d love for you to keep exploring them with me. Listen to The Story of Us: From Cosmic Dawn to the Depths of Being, where every week we sit with people from wildly different walks of life and explore what it means to be human.
And subscribe free to Letters from the Middle of It All for weekly reflections on meaning, family, aging, spirituality, wonder, and this strange privilege of being alive.
And maybe share this one with someone who could use a little more joy.
Not someday.
Not when everything settles down.
Now.
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