Designing Our Joy

I attended a talk given by a former Olympic athlete recently, a man called John Coyle, who won silver at Lillehammer in speed skating, and is now a motivational speaker of eloquence and energy. 

The subject of this talk was the difference between chronological and experiential time: or, as he put it to us, how to create the endless summers of our childhood days, as life seems to get faster and more bound by routine and less joyful as we grow older. 

A lot of our best memories as human beings, the most vivid, the most loaded with sensory impressions, are lit up in our imagination because they were our first experiences of something: our first swim in the ocean, the first climb of a sacred mountain, our first dance, etc. Anticipation was huge, and our openness to the experience was heightened by adrenaline. 

The teenage years and our twenties and early thirties contain some powerful life experiences, electrified by wonder, because they extend the boundaries of our known world. We are growing, through study, work and socially, and we are on an arc of expansive discovery. 

Physically, our bodies are full of vitality and we are fit and flexible: energy in motion. Our immunity is high - we can shake off illness and depression easily. We are enjoying the adventure, and the process of rapid growth and learning. 

John Coyle pointed out that in our search for stability and freedom from anxiety in our lives, both professionally and personally, we often settle down after this early flurry of activity into a passive and unexciting personal Middle Ages. Goals are achieved, and the mode is ‘keeping on keeping on’ - continuity, life insurance, health insurance - rather than discovering new ground. It becomes mechanical, and often tastes stale. 

We are becoming petrified - not in an exciting way. We are turning into stone. How do we know this is happening? When we cannot remember doing anything new or meeting anyone different for ages. When we find ourselves doing roughly the same things and saying the same things with the same people. Year after year. Like clockwork. 

This is chronological time. Measured by sameness and routine and schedule. Monochrome in colour. 

The vibrant colours of wondrous, life-enhancing experiences are how we measure experiential time. And according to Coyle, we can design at least 5 or 6 of these experiences in our lives each year. 

The more we can do so, the more alive we will feel. 

We plan a trip to a place we have not been to, before. We read books or watch films we have never known or heard of. We challenge ourselves to expand our habitual food and drink repertoire. We make new friends. We alter our set patterns, and make life more interesting and less predictable. 

Perhaps most importantly, we embrace the concept that danger, trauma and emergency should not be airbrushed out of our lives. We should allow ourselves the opportunity to go outside the sanitized realm of our perpetual safety and comfort. We could challenge ourselves to face and live some inconvenient truths, amidst the high volume thread count sheets and luxury towels of our survivalist aspirations. 

Coyle told us about a trip he had made with his daughter to a resort a few years ago where everything was luxurious and gorgeous - and in which he felt restless and cocooned. He suggested they go for a walk towards a town they could see the lights of, nearby. He had not researched it or prepared for the trip. The town looked closer and more accessible than it was. 

They took ages to get there - and as it was on a tropical atoll, their rubber shoes were ripped to shreds by the coral on the sands and they were in physical pain, dehydrated, hungry and exhausted when they finally sat down. But he said the meal they finally had at the end of that unexpected trip was one of the best and most delicious feasts he had ever enjoyed. He can remember every part of it in detail, years later. He can recall it at will. Because it was such an unexpected contrast with what had come before. 

Listening to him, I remembered something a student of mine had said some years ago. His sister suffered from depression, and he had observed that she would send herself into a downward spiral by focusing obsessively on one negative event or situation and blowing it all out of proportion to the point where she was frantic with sadness, glum and downcast. She felt helpless to stop this process once it started. 

He said, I thought what if she could reverse this? She could find one thing, however small, like a tiny orange flower in a grey arid zone, and expand it, zoom its significance in her mind, intensely celebrate it, until it took over all her mental space. It would be a remedy for the sadness! 

Similarly, we can create joy for ourselves and certain select others by planning opportunities to surprise ourselves, to be open and to respond in a heightened way to what gives us most pleasure. We can slow down the time for these joys - we can zoom in on them, mentally. These are the experiences we remember, and we can pattern them like lights on a string, to illuminate our way.