JOY FORWARD
Stop looking backwards for joy - Just Open Yourself to all the joy that is ahead!
Today in dance class the teacher asked us to dance as if we were seven years old again. Everyone around me seemed to naturally move into this playful childlike energy, but something unexpected happened to me today. Instead of imagining myself younger, I suddenly imagined myself older. Much older. I experienced myself as an 80 year old woman dancing.
And honestly, it felt so beautiful.
I could feel that as an 80 year old woman I was even more profoundly tapping into a deep sense of wonder and gratitude moving through my body. Gratitude for my body and that I was moving my body at 80. Enjoying my body at 80. Gratitude for the warmth of the sun on my aged skin and the feeling of the wind moving across my wrinkled arms. There was this awareness of time, aging, and life itself, but it did not feel sad. It felt rich. Full. Deep. Sacred. Alive. I realized that future version of me was not looking backward wishing for youth again. She was fully inside the moment she was living in and deeply enjoying.
It made me think about how often we connect joy to the past. We look backward as if that was as good as life gets. We revisit memories trying to reconnect to feelings we once had, almost treating joy like something that already happened instead of something that still exists ahead of us. But standing there dancing, I realized I want to give what is forward just as much permission to be joyful as what is behind me.
I do not want to spend my life grieving aging while I am still living. I want to envision myself as a joyful older woman. Wise. Experienced. Mature. Still curious. Still alive. Still capable of feeling wonder. Still able to deeply enjoy being here.
I think there is something powerful about allowing ourselves to look ahead with love instead of fear. Aging is not the opposite of living. It is living. It is the continuation of all the moments we have already experienced. I have been growing up my entire life, but now I feel like I am entering a season where I can truly appreciate what it means to be fully alive in the moment while also honoring the depth of time.
I want to keep celebrating this moment and the next one and the next one after that. I want to look back one day and know I actually allowed myself to enjoy my life instead of constantly waiting for some future moment to finally feel good enough, safe enough, or complete enough to relax into joy.
When I was very young, I remember hearing this deep feeling inside of me that said, “This life is going to feel good.” I did not know what happened before I got here and I do not know what happens when I leave, but I remember feeling certain that I was here to experience life fully. To feel it. To enjoy it. To be present for it.
Maybe that is what joy forward means.
Not only appreciating where you have been, but staying open to the possibility that some of the most meaningful, joyful, connected moments of your life may still be ahead of you.
JOY.
Just Open Yourself.
LOVE & JOY - Susan Patrick
