Collecting Confetti
January can feel like a hard and cold month. There’s often a sense of pressure, a pushing, a force shoving you into the new year with lots of ‘shoulds’ that can feel weighty, and make you feel like you always have to be working towards something, a specific purpose, a goal, an objective, an outcome.
Of course, it’s great to have a sense of purpose and goals to work towards, but what if we released the pressure valve by making time for things that have absolutely no reason what-so-ever?
Ingrid Fetel Lee (designer and founder of The Aesthetics of Joy) in her Ted Talk, explains that experiencing moments of joy can have an incredible power in enhancing and even extending our lives.
She explains that joy is ‘an intense momentary experience of positive emotion’ and certain things in our physical world ignite joy in a universal way across humanity;- cherry blossom, hot air balloons, bright colours, bubbles, confetti....
Let’s take a closer look at the elusive confetti. There is no reason or purpose for confetti at all, outside of being purely joyful. It’s playful, it’s colourful, it’s soft and delicate, it brings a sense of lightness and celebration, and it’s completely uncontrollable. And I think that’s where the magic lies.
That moment when we throw confetti up in the air, we give-in to the laws of nature, we let those little pieces flutter on the breeze, twist and turn in the wind, to land anywhere they happen to settle.
So what if we were to take this approach to building in moments of release and uncontrollability into our days of shoulds, plans, and objectives?
What if we did something with absolutely no intention or reason behind it at all, except for pure joy?
What if we were to let ourselves surrender to being taken by a moment, and carried in any direction, with no expectations or meaning in where you end up?
This is your permission slip to be excused from all your ‘should do’s’ for a moment and start collecting your absolutely pointless yet glorious confetti of joyful moments.
How will you find a moment of pure joy this month?