"I feel great joy in dancing, especially to conga drums. I love swimming with wild dolphins off Hawaii's shores. I adore hiking through meadows of wild iris, magenta-colored Indian paint brush, purple fringe, and columbine that only bloom above 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. In winter, I love forging a cross-country ski trail with friends through fresh powder and drinking in the snow-covered peaks in every direction. I could go on, and I'm sure you could make your own list of the things and activities that bring you joy.
"But doing the things we love, no matter how much we love them, brings only a fleeting joy. Try as we may to cram every weekend, every vacation, every free moment with the things we love, we still have to return to the rest of our lives: We still have work to do, groceries to buy, bills to pay, and the car to keep running. We still have to wake up four or five times in the night to nurse the infant and get up early to taxi the older kids to school, then get ourselves to work on time. We still have to face conflict in our relationship and money worries. We still have to address the headaches, flu, back pain, illness, and other physical symptoms that life brings our way.
"We can't expect to find joy in all this hard stuff. Or can we? I'm here to tell you that we can. In fact, if we only expect to find joy while doing what we really love, we end up spending about 90 percent of our lives joyless. And, as you will soon find out, we are the ones who limit our joy. That's not only a lousy deal, it's not at all the way it's supposed to be.
"I want to introduce you to a broader, more expanded version of joy. I want to reacquaint you with the unlimited joy that lives deep in your core. Not that over-the-top ecstatic joy we feel after dancing, skiing or doing what we love all day (though it can be) but the softer, subtler joy that can flood our awareness with a sense of inner peace and well-being, no matter what is happening around us. The ever-present inner joy that allows us to take everything much less seriously."
