joy: week 25

an apple cider donut a day keeps the blues away

I’ve been doing this for 25 weeks now, and it’s made such a difference in my life. Actively looking for joys has made me learn to be present enough to actually take it all in instead of being so absorbed with the past and future that I can’t concentrate on what’s in front of me. I’m more careful with these moments now. I hold them like the fragile items they are. I know that joy can be fleeting, that reverie can be shattered by intrusive thoughts. So with this little project I started, I’ve learned the language of joy; how to speak it, understand it, be fluent in it. I thank you for encouraging me by reading, liking, and commenting on my weekly posts. I hope you all are getting something out of this as well.

Fall is in full swing now. The leaves are starting to change, the temperature during the day has dipped into the sixties. I wore my black work boots this week. I’ve had them for five years now and not only are they super comfortable, but they are a treasure to me. I take them out of the closet on the first day that feels like fall. I dust them off and welcome them back to the fold. Then I wait. I wait until there’s a few days of fall weather strung together and only then am I daring enough to put the fall work boots on before anyone else has even gotten out of shorts. But oh, it feels so good to finally put them on. That little act means everything to me. It’s a true mark of the return of the Good Season.

Another marker of autumn: apple cider and apple cider donuts. My sister Jo-Anne and I took a ride to Jericho Cider Mill and indulged in the fall tradition. I got a frozen cider, cherry filled apple donuts, a blueberry pie, and of course apple cider donuts, one of which I ate on the way home.

I spent one night this week listening to nothing but 70s classic rock albums. Normally I do not listen to this type of music except when I’m feeling very nostalgic, and given that I came across my high school yearbook I was deep in my feelings, and got the sudden desire to hear songs from those days. I listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Zeppelin, The Who, Steve Miller Band and Pink Floyd albums before I moved on to 70s playlists.

You want to talk about joy? Listening to Who’s Next for the first time in about twenty years really blew my mind. There’s not a bad song on that album. A record that starts with “Baba O’Riley” and closes with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and has no filler in between? Amazing. I think I appreciate it more in 2023 than I did in 1975 when I first listened to it. How much joy did I get out of listening to these albums? These were delivered the next day.

So I had a bright idea this week that is either going to be an incredible project or a disaster because it might become overwhelming. I had been listening to a playlist of songs from 1994 and thinking about what an incredible year that was for music. Then it dawned on me that all those albums will be turning 30 in 2024. The anniversary pieces in music publications are going to be coming at us fast and furious. Then I thought, what if I add to the glut of incoming essays and aggregate a collection of them from my friends and put them here in a newsletter? I put the word out on twitter and Facebook that I’d like to collect essays about albums from 1994 and I never expected the response I received. I’m going to end up taking a whole week here on the newsletter to publish every entry. It’s going to be fantastic and I’m really looking forward to reading every one of them and I hope you enjoy reading them as well.

All in all, a pretty good week. I hope you find joy in the week ahead. Thanks for being part of mine.