When I first started to look for joy, I realized that the word “joy” has taken up a lot of space in my life, yet I never thought to try and understand what it truly meant. “Joy” seemed like an amorphous being that lived in its own private universe far from the prying eyes of its owner. So I started to try and find a clearer definition of “joy,” and along the way, I discovered that according to author and designer Ingrid Fetell Lee, psychologists define joy as “an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion.” And I thought, “Yes. That sounds about right.” But as I started to journey farther on my quest for finding and reactivating my joy, something about that definition didn’t fully encompass the meaning that I was finding within the word itself. I started to find my own definition of “joy” and all the ways I knew to describe it.

What I love best when I look back to when I was a kid is the amount of joy I could find in the world around me. Joy was free to me, and I happily took it from as many places as I could get it. Somewhere along the way, however, that joy seemed to wane.