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Editor’s Desk: Savoring Life Is About Joy

POSTED September 10, 2023 IN
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Image source: Bigstock | ©Robert Bayer

Image source: Dreamstime | ©Robert Bayer

To savor is to take in, to taste or smell with pleasure, to relish, enjoy, have experience of, delight in. To savor is to appreciate.

Take a moment to think of something or someone you deeply appreciate. Does this instantly transport you to feelings of expansive joy? Jump into this pool of appreciation and splash around for a moment. This feeling of joy and delight is available every day. It is always close at hand and is our birthright.

To keep “burn-out” at bay, I’ve learned from experience that it is important to schedule some “down time” in my life. I find it odd that this is not as easy as it sounds. One of my favorite passages from a book is from Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Sidda, the young woman narrating the story, is looking at a picture of her mother and her girlfriends when they were teenagers. The photo caught them lounging on a porch on a muggy, summer afternoon. She says, “I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.”

From the book: “Sidda was tired of being vigilant, alert sharp. She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girlness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words “time management” out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down into the uncharted beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.”

Savoring life is about joy. What is your joy quotient? If you don’t know what it is, may I suggest you make a commitment to dig it out and bring it into the light? What are the circumstances in your life that bring you joy? I’ve discovered that this “joy quotient” is a biological necessity to keep me in good health and harmony with my surroundings. I’ve learned that it’s important to follow my natural enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, I’ve discovered, is a gift from spirit. When work comes from a natural joy and exuberance, creativity blossoms.

Novelist Tom Robbins gives us a great life purpose statement in his novel Jitterbug Perfume. “Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve towards a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake and set up our computers among the wild apple trees. Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy.”

What Tom Robbins is talking about here is savoring life. I invite us all, like Sidda, to let ourselves float into that swamp of life, letting ourselves savor the gifts of creativity and joy.

– Justine Willis Toms

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