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Joy is hard to sustain. It tends to exist not for hours, let alone for years, but for just a moment—distilled happiness.
Listing your life’s joyous moments and keeping them in a prominent place can be a balm in tough, even scary times.
Creating your list
Off the top of your head, it may be hard to recall joyous moments. So it may help to use a structured approach to unearthing them.
- Think back on your life. Start with your earliest memory and proceed through the stages of your life, perhaps childhood, teenage years, college, your 20s, 30’s, and so on.
- Inventory your life again, this time thematically: school, friends, family, love, work, hobbies, special experiences, for example trips or projects.
- (Optional:) Prune your list so it consists only of joys that rise above the rest.
- Keep the list in a prominent place or two, perhaps as the wallpaper on your computer screen, as a note in your phone, on the refrigerator, even as a plaque you’d keep in your study or bedroom.
An example
Perhaps it might inspire you to create that list if I share the story of what, on reflection, is my life’s happiest moment.
I'm the last guy you’d think would play college baseball, or should I say, the last person you’d think would even get to sit on the bench for four years on a college team, even though it was Division III, the NCAA's lowest level. After all, my parents refused to let me play even Little League baseball for fear I’d hurt my hands—you see, I play the piano. The closest I came to baseball was schlepper softball at 8 a.m. on Sunday mornings with other potzers for whom organized baseball was what you watched on TV.
But I could throw hard—86 miles an hour, and as a bonus, my fastball didn’t just go straight: I have a natural screwball, that is, it tails away from a right-hand batter.
So Bob Tierney, coach of the Queens College Knights, decided to make me player #25 of the team’s 25 players. And my playing time showed it. You see, while I could throw hard and, in practice even could usually throw strikes, in the game, I got nervous and was wilder than Ryne Duren. After a couple of incidents of my walking three batters in a row, I had earned a permanent spot on the bench. Tierney didn’t cut me from the team because I was a useful batting practice pitcher and because he knew how honored I was to get to wear a baseball uniform, number 32 no less, the number worn by my hero, Sandy Koufax.
But there was the one time.
We were playing Army, by far the toughest team on our schedule, a team we had no right playing, let alone beating. It was the 9th inning and miracle of miracles, we were up by a run. We just had to hold Army scoreless that one inning.
Everything was looking good: Our pitcher got the first two Army batters out. But the next batter hit a double. "Nemko!" Tierney called. “Left field!” You see, our left fielder was a slugger but had a weak throwing arm. If the next batter got a single to left, just maybe I’d have a better chance of throwing the runner out at the plate. It was a distant possibility but baseball is a game of percentages. You do everything you can to boost your odds, even a little.
But I couldn’t believe he picked me! I was a pitcher, not an outfielder. Worse, I was a Nervous Nellie bench-sitter, who in four years had pitched a total of about three innings, batted maybe ten times, and had never played the outfield, not once.
Lo and behold, the batter hit a base hit deep down the left field line. I raced over and, miracle, I actually gloved it and, with every bit of my overactive adrenal gland pumping, I fired the ball toward home plate with all my might.
And sometimes fairy tales come true: My throw was pretty close to on-target and the catcher had enough time to reach back and tag the runner sliding into home plate. The ump nonchalantly made the “out” sign, a nonchalance that was 180 degrees from my emotion. I, Martin Nerdy Nemko, actually made the play that enabled lowly Queens College to beat mighty Army.
At the risk of revealing my shallowness, now 50, yes 50 years later, that remains the happiest moment of my life.
Now, what are your most joyous moments?
I read this aloud on YouTube.
