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Hackett: New year, new ways to find joy

Where do you find joy in the day to day?
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Byron Hackett Managing Editor

It's an endless pursuit I find myself reflecting on year after year. 

For a long time, I thought being happy was the goal.

"I just want to be happier," I would say as the years came to a close. Without much action or plan, I would wander aimlessly through life, chasing happiness, like a child chasing a butterfly through a forest. 

But as I've grown older, I've started to realize that happiness isn't and shouldn't be the goal. It hangs just beyond your reach, teasing and taunting your pursuit. 

I think finding joy– keeping tabs on those moments that bring you a small – or large amount of joy add up to a much happier life and make the journey through life that much more enjoyable. And in the end, I think that's what we're striving for here– to live a fulfilling life because it was filled with joy. 

It's easy in the day-to-day monotony of life to let the little annoyances snowball and take away from that joy and become bigger than any sort of positivity. In a vacuum, those moments steal joy. When you look back at the end of a day or a week, those little frustrations or annoyances become the highlights, rather than the small moments of joy that we tend to overlook. 

On a recent vacation to Ontario, I experienced this firsthand. My sister's family was visiting from Australia, their first Christmas visit to North America in nine years. At the end of the week, I let the business of the holidays, the chaos that always comes with Christmas time and big families, be the defining moments of my visit. 

I didn't spend enough time really letting myself feel the joy of helping my young niece and nephew build their first snowman and potentially Canada's first-ever snow Koala. We had snowball fights and they chased me as the "snow monster" and we all laughed until we fell down. Who knows how much of the visit they'll actually remember in a year or five, but I had an opportunity to make those moments bring more joy to my year, but in the days that followed the visit, I let the bad distract from the good. 

Those moments in life are so precious too, yet they slip through fingers of time so quickly and easily. The negativity and sadness always tries to drown them out.

When you look at the big picture, hiking 96 kilometres in 5 days or reading 25 books are good for highlights, but they don't bring that same daily joy. I went ice fishing for the first time earlier this year and actually caught a fish, but the daily grind finds a way to bury those moments and the joy they brought at the time. I cross-country skied in the mountains for the first time, a challenge I didn't think would be as hard as it was. But it was worth it for the views. 

I'll encourage everyone to look back on the photos you took in 2024, because I guarantee some moments made you smile, that you captured and quickly dropped from the memory bank. 

For a while in 2024, I was journaling about three moments that brought me joy in a day. Of course, as life got busy and I got tired, the dedication slipped away, and I stopped chronicling those moments.  In 2025, I think I will try and be a bit easier on myself and reflect on one thing a week that brought me true joy. There's a viral trend about writing those moments down and putting them in a jar, then reading them on New Year's Eve, 52 weeks later. That means 52 joyful moments to reflect on in the past year. That sounds like nice thing. Just hard enough to be worth it, though. 

I'm not big on resolutions, but in 2025 I hope to challenge myself a bit more. Step out of my comfort zone and pursue a few things I'm not sure I can do. I'm going to chase new experiences and be a bit kinder to myself and others. Be quicker to forgive, quicker to find empathy, and more cognizant of those little moments where joy is present.

Here's to a happy and thriving 2025 for us all. 

Byron Hackett is the Managing Editor of the Red Deer Advocate and a Regional Editor for Black Press Media.  

 



About the Author: Byron Hackett

I have been apart of the Red Deer Advocate Black Press Media team since 2017, starting as a sports reporter.
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