Soul Blossoming A to Z: E is for Enjoy

Enjoy: take delight or pleasure in (an activity or occasion) (google dictionary)

Poetry Friday and A to Z Blogging Challenge all in this itty-bitty post!

Today’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Karen Edmisten who shares a wonderful poem by John Ashbery–as well as links to other Poetry Friday posts. Thanks, Karen!

And did you know that April is National Poetry Month? I just found out, and I’m excited! It’s been going on since 1996, so it’s not exactly new, but still, it’s new to me.

To top all that off, it’s day five of the A to Z blogging challenge.

Today’s letter is and my post today is about enjoyment.

Origin of “Enjoy”

A Poem

Here’s a little poem I wrote about enjoyment:

Days rush by in a whirl and a wind

moments oft slip through my hand.

I regularly forget to appreciate

a smile, a breeze, a recreate.

But what do we have but moments and breaths

which we can spend in unpleasant stress

or choose to pause, to smile and enjoy

life’s  simple pleasures and everyday joys

Choosing Joy

I can’t do it all the time, for sure. Just today, I felt very upset because a friend of mine got fired from her job for being ill. I suppose it’s possible to find joy in everything–and my friend is probably better off not working in the place where she was. But still, I try to find some joy every day. I do this not by ignoring the things that upset me or make me sad.

I’m learning to feel my feelings. It doesn’t seem like that should be hard. But for me, it was. I wanted everything and everyone to be happy all the time. And I lived in a jumble of feelings.

But I’ve found that by feeling all of my feelings including the ones we think of as negative, I can feel much more joy in my life.

As a parent and then teacher of young children, I wanted the children in my care to feel all of their feelings. I didn’t want them to think that some were good feelings and some bad. All feelings are just feelings. They give us information. And it serves us well to learn to express our feelings in appropriate ways. And so I had to learn to do that myself.

I didn’t, like some of my little ones, express my feelings by hitting or yelling. For me, I had to bring my feelings to the surface, to allow myself to feel them and then decide how to express them–or not, but at least to acknowledge them.

And for me, that allowed me to choose joy. I learned from the children. They would go from the depths of sadness or anger to the heights of joy within a moment–or sometimes two. Feel whatever I feel and move on. Carrying around a bunch of unacknowledged feelings left me feeling mush most of the time. Learning not to resist or ignore my feelings–and I’m still learning–has allowed me to enjoy life.

Enough said

I could ramble on about this stuff indefinitely, but I’ll stop here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, though.

And I notice that I wrote a lot about allowing–here’s my post on that.

Thanks for stopping by.

xoxo