This week: For The Sheer Joy Of It Edited by: NaNoKit  
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When have you last done something for the sheer joy of it? If you're anything like me, it was a while ago...
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about the importance of joy.
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Do you remember when, as a child, you would do something for the sheer joy of it? It doesn’t really matter what it was, or how much (or how little) sense it made to do it. I remember jumping into piles of autumn leaves, and splashing around in puddles. I’d skip around, singing songs, and I have especially fond memories of when I convinced my mom to play along, and we’d prance around the house being silly and having a laugh. We can lose that light-hearted, guiltless joy when we get older. But we don’t have to...
It’s all too easy to let it slip away, though. Being an adult is tough. We have so many duties, so many responsibilities, and only so much time available to us. Whatever we do, then, ought to make sense. Even fun is planned in detail and carefully slotted into our schedule. The spontaneity of childhood gets left behind, step by step, year by year, and it feels as though the more successful we are, by societal standards, the more serious and “rational” we become.
I placed rational between quotation marks because how rational is it, really, to not allow ourselves the time to simply be? To stop doing things for the sheer joy of it? When we stop allowing ourselves these things, we lose something important. I am reminded of a friend of mine...
This friend loved to sing. She wasn’t the greatest singer in the world, but she had a sweet and pleasant voice and, above all, her joy in singing shone through. Some people who had heard her convinced her to join a choir and at first she loved it, and the techniques she learned helped her to improve. She wasn’t the most outgoing of people, but she’d perform in church, with the rest of the choir, and it did give her joy to sing for the Lord, and for the congregation. But then, her family and some members of the choir began to place pressure on her. Pressure to practice more, focus more on just the choir materials rather than sing for the love of singing when at home. Perfect yourself. Perfect. Perfect. Little by little, the joy slipped away and when she sang in the choir, she was no longer singing for the Lord, but trying to remember all the many tips she’d been given and techniques she ought to apply, hoping she’d be perfect and that, this time, she wouldn’t be told off.
My friend isn’t the only one who something like that has happened to. There are plenty of children who love to play a musical instrument, or dance, or play football, who are then placed under such an amount of pressure and are so restricted in the direction that everyone else wants them to take rather than the direction they chose for themselves that any and all love and joy of the activity evaporates. It often takes quitting the activity to finally get that joy back, and even then it can take a long time...
I, too, have had it happen. A couple of years ago I was made to feel like my writing wasn’t good enough, not compared to the people I hung out with. There were plenty of people who loved my work, and my style, but we often seem to be more affected by negative comments rather than positive ones – at the very least the negative comments can sow doubt, and doubt can be difficult to shake off. So, I attempted to change the way I write. The style, the tone, the content. I wanted to be taken more seriously. I wanted to fit in. The result was that I learned things, and I had some successes, but my work no longer reflected who I am, and it stopped being fun. I lost the joy I’d always found in my writing. A year and a half later, I still haven’t rediscovered that joy. Hopefully, one day, I will.
Perhaps, then, we can try to make room in our lives for what brings us joy, without overanalysing it and without placing too much pressure on ourselves. That’s what doing something for the sheer joy of it means. Splash in that puddle. Sing the song that’s in your heart. Pour your soul into that poem. Allow yourself to soar! We need joy to balance the serious aspects of life, so be kind to yourself. Have some fun. 
Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
NaNoKit
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Spiritual: August 07, 2019 Issue [#9696]
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