Joy Is Waiting

Synchronicity, spring, and remembering what was always there

Mar 10, 2026

image: Midjourney Voice: Beca’s cloned voice ElevenLabs

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A few years ago, spring was barely a whisper on the day I took my walk — a tentative green here, a single brave bloom there.

Then, just days later, I returned from a trip and stepped outside to find that the world had exploded.

There is no other word for it. Explosion. A riot of color so extravagant it felt almost absurd — flowers, trees, and bushes erupting in every hue imaginable.

Even the lawns had joined in, speckled with dandelions and spring beauties, refusing to be left out of the celebration. In the span of a few days, the earth had gone from holding its breath to singing at the top of its lungs.

I stood there in the middle of it, and I laughed.

Because just before that trip — a short, joyful journey to the Berkshires to visit dear friends — I had found something tucked away in a pile of papers.

A small, folded note I had carried around for years and hadn’t laid eyes on in a long time. Inside it: the lyrics to a Lou Christie song, written out by hand, given to Del and me by those same friends years ago when we were traveling the country together.

It had been our theme song. We would play that cassette over and over as the miles rolled by, declaring to the open road what we were choosing and what we were releasing.

“Goodbye to things that bore me. Joy is waiting for me.”

Finding that note just days before seeing those same friends again — that is the kind of cosmic wink I have come to recognize as the universe’s sense of humor.

Synchronicity doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. It arrives quietly, in a folded piece of paper at the bottom of a pile.

Back then, traveling the country with Del, we were doing more than seeing new places. We were sorting through our lives — figuring out what we truly wanted, and gently but deliberately releasing what no longer fit.

What had “bored” us, in the deepest sense. What had become dead weight. What was never really ours to carry at all.

And then, returning from that Berkshires trip, joy was indeed waiting for us — in the form of spring’s astonishing arrival. But as I thought about it more, I realized: joy had been waiting the entire time.

It was waiting on the train. It was waiting in our friends’ warm home, in the coffee houses and restaurants we lingered in, even at the delightful little farm where we watched baby animals discover their legs.

Joy doesn’t save itself for the perfect moment. It doesn’t wait until conditions are right, or we’ve earned it, or the hard things are finished. It is present in every moment, patient and unhurried, waiting for us to turn toward it.

The problem is never that joy is absent. The problem is that we forget to notice it.

We forget because we are gripping things that no longer serve us. Old grievances, worn-out stories, fears we’ve outgrown but haven’t yet set down.

Things that “bore” us in Lou Christie’s beautiful, double-meaning sense of the word — they don’t just bore us with tedium. They bore into us. They weigh us down.

And sometimes, it’s not something internal keeping us from joy. The world itself can crowd it out. The news cycle relentlessly delivers evidence of cruelty and division. Illness arrives uninvited.

Financial pressure dims the light. People we love suffer. These are not small things, and they deserve to be acknowledged.

But here is what I know from years of spiritual practice and from a life that has had its share of hard chapters: in precisely those moments, joy becomes even more essential.

Not as a denial of difficulty, but as an act of resistance against it.

Choosing joy when things are hard is a spiritual declaration — a statement that no external force has final say over the quality of our inner life.

It is an act of faith. It says: I believe that goodness is the deeper power. I believe that light outlasts darkness. I believe that no person, no circumstance, no headline has the power to colonize my spirit without my consent.

When we choose joy, we do not pretend that hard things aren’t hard. We simply refuse to let the hard things be the whole story.

On my spring walks, when a neighbor and I catch eyes, and one of us says, “What a gorgeous day!” — that small exchange is not small at all.

It is two people handing each other a moment of grace. We don’t apologize for it. We don’t hedge it. We let our faces open into it, our steps lighten, our voices lift. We share the joy freely, without embarrassment, because joy shared is joy multiplied.

Imagine designing your life around delight.

Not as frivolity, but as spiritual practice. What if the question you returned to again and again was: Where is the joy in this moment? What if you trusted that it was always there, even on the hard days, waiting patiently just at the edge of your attention?

Play the song. Seriously — find it, put it on, and let those lyrics get lodged in your head where they belong. “Goodbye to things that bore me. Joy is waiting for me.”

Say it out loud. Mean it. Let it be a gentle permission to release something you’ve been holding too long.

The universe will have a laugh with you, as it did with me.

One final joy discovery happened as I was writing the first draft of this very piece when I stopped to jot down something I needed from the store.

I grabbed the little notepad I always keep nearby, the one I’d been using for months without ever really looking at it. I wrote my note. And then, for the first time, I noticed the word printed at the top of the pad.

Joy.

Of course.

Joy was waiting for me all along — on my notepad, in the spring blooms, in an old cassette song, in the faces of friends, in a folded piece of paper found at exactly the right moment.

It is waiting for you, too. It always has been.

👉👉 Listen to Lou Christie sing Beyond The Blue Horizon.👈👈