Last time I mowed my lawn, I noticed some Queen Anne’s lace had sprouted in my yard. I love Queen Anne’s lace, so I mowed around the small plants. Two weeks later, and now I have beautiful wildflowers blooming in my yard. It’s like a personal mini-meadow, and it ignites a spark of happiness in me every time I step out my side door.
This is what I call “a little good thing” or a “small joy.”
In a world where loneliness, disconnection, violence, disaster, and dysfunction often seem to get the most screen time, it’s vitally important to offer yourself and your nervous system the antidote of small joys.
What brings a smile to your heart?
What bits of nature speak life to you? What foods and flavors ease your adult-weariness and bring you back to your child-self? What corny habits help you feel at home in your body? What memes make you snort with laughter?
Find the tiny things that move your soul toward life and joy. No matter how small or random.
Cultivating the habit of noticing the little good things can have a mighty impact on your life over time.
Here’s how and why:
You are a physical being with a nervous system.
And you are a conscious being with a cognitive brain.
And you are an energetic being with invisible connections to every other living thing.
And your physical body, your cognitive self, and your energetic body are intertwined with each other. They are networked. They talk.
When your nervous system is focused primarily on dealing with the challenges of life, it stays in stress mode. Hypervigilance. Anxiety. (Long-term hypervigilance eventually implodes into depression. It’s a pretty vicious cycle.)
When your body-self is stressed and defensive, it tells your cognitive self that life is painful/overwhelming/hopeless/etc. And here’s the thing, the cognitive self has an ego. Your brain likes to be right. In its default setting, the brain prioritizes being right over being happy.
(This is because, developmentally being “right” is highly correlated with safety/helping you survive. And your brain’s biggest biological priority is to keep you alive.)
One way the brain interfaces with the energetic self is through the reticular activating system (RAS). This is the brain’s filter, and it’s biased towards proving its own point. Your RAS is the reason that once you decide you really want a Yeti, you start seeing people with Yetis everywhere. They were there all along, but now your brain has determined that a Yeti is important to your experience of life and has calibrated your RAS to register all Yeti sightings.
So the brain takes the inputs from the stressed experiences of the nervous system and calibrates the RAS to, in fact, notice all the pain points of life. And this communicates to the energetic body to align with stressor-energies. Which it does.
This puts your nervous system, your consciousness, and your energetic connectivity into alignment/solidarity. It creates a predictable, sustainable eco-system for yourself. Even though it’s an unhappy one!
The body stays locked in defense mode.
The brain maintains its feedback loops.
The energetic self seals the deal by connecting with experiences that validate this status quo.
Kinda alarming, isn’t it?
We have sayings and axioms that express this reality: “Birds of a feather flock together.” “Like attracts like.” “Misery loves company.” “What you focus on expands.”
These old clichés exist because they are tapped into a true principle of life…even if we are only now discovering some of the neuro-biology behind how it works.
But here’s the good news:
You can interrupt the painful ecosystem at any level and begin to move toward starting a different conversation among your parts.
This is where the little good things come in.
Letting yourself notice and appreciate the little good things is a way of introducing a new data-set into your ecosystem. New data = opportunity to re-calibrate.
And the new data can be inputted into your system from any part of you. A pleasant physical experience (getting a massage, watching a sunset), a positive cognitive stimulant (enjoying a moment of humor, acknowledging how you rocked that work project), or even a brief energetic mood shift (an affirmation that supports you, celebrating something good that happened for your friend) are all experiences that offer you a way toward a generally happier ecosystem.
The thing is to start becoming aware of the little good things.
Capitalize on them.
Make the most of them.
Not in a trivial or toxic-positivity way.
Not in a way that hides from pain.
In a way that leads you through the pain.
In a way that lets you emerge on the far side of pain into a different reality.
These tiny gifts are your stepping stones. Your stars in the night sky. Your navigational guides.
Look for them. They are there.
Even if they are faint and few at first. Don’t give up. Keep looking. The RAS will help you, once you get it kick-started in a new direction (this is why I even noticed those tiny Queen Anne’s lace plants–the RAS was at work in pointing those out before I just obliviously mowed right over them).
Enjoy the little good things whenever and wherever find them.
Breathe their goodness and light deep inside yourself.
The Queen Anne’s lace. The rays of sunlight streaming through the gray clouds. The cute dog you saw on your morning walk. The actually clever ad on the billboard you drove past. The way you saw one coworker making life better for another coworker. Taking that extra minute to lightly toast your bread for your sandwich. (Right?!) Stopping in at the farmers market because peaches are in season right now.
Let the small joys in.
Let them accumulate.
Let them start to balance out the other many inputs that we receive in our daily lives.
Life has challenges, for sure.
Things won’t always be easy or simple.
We will still experience encounters with deep pain of various sorts.
But the little good things can expand your ecosystem. They can remind your whole self that trauma doesn’t always win the day. They can support your healing one small joy at a time. They can add a more beautiful, hopeful voice into the inner dialogue of your life.
And maybe…just maybe, over time, they can make your whole life feel more like, well, a big good thing.
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