Describe one habit that brings you joy.

I think the one habit that has brought me the most joy has been the hardest to find. I began by going to the fitness center every day, but that did not bring me joy. Looking outside elsewhere, I found so many extrinsic values I was told I should chase to find happiness. I just kept getting sadder and more detached from life, my family, and my community, then the pandemic hit, and it was a death knell; I stopped caring about the world altogether for a while there.

I just drew inside my shell and did what I could to get along. Like the rest of the world, all we could get were the bare necessities because of panic hoarders. It probably doesn’t help that I was also going through a life-shattering change in my physical health during the same timeframe. It was a rough six years for my mental health, hence the break from blogging and most of my writing projects.

Amid the doom and gloom of a pandemic, developing a physical disability, a mental health crisis mostly over the disability and all the unprocessed issues I chose not to think about for decades, a career change, selling two farms in quick succession, finally moving to town, then realizing it was too far from the specialty care team and moving house one more time, I found a daily mindfulness practice. The morning mindfulness practice became meditation and yoga for a time. Then it became coffee and my daily Stoic app journal prompts. I read a lot of Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Ryan Holliday, and the like.

Whether I do the yoga first thing or not, the cats lie on me during my mindfulness time. But that isn’t what brings me joy. What gives me pleasure is being at peace with myself, mostly. It’s a process, or they wouldn’t have monks spending their whole lives as ascetics attempting to attain spiritual peace.

I’m at least happy-adjacent the majority of the time now. And I try hard to keep working through my battles to reach that goal every day. Even if I don’t attain it, it is a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goal that I can aspire to, and I don’t hold my yesterdays against my tomorrows.