Joy-IT
I started a Joy-it wall a few years ago—my one-of-a-kind in-house, low-cost art installation.
The concept = very simple:
Doodles of things that brought me authentic joy.
The resources = also simple:
Post-its.
Sharpies.
Thirty seconds to 10 minutes.
The commitment = simple to understand, not so easy to keep:
One doodle at the end of every day. Also, invite the kiddo to contribute his doodle as often as possible.
Two Rules:
Date doodle
Once doodle is done, stick it on the stairwell wall leading up to our home’s only two bedrooms.
As with most things, I started strong (and to my surprise, the kiddo willfully participated for about the first month). The top left-hand corner of our stairwell, right outside my bedroom door, started to become filled with brightly colored post-its covered in cartoon-esque images depicting dancing in the kitchen, epic video game battles, Christmas tree decorating, lighting incense, having no homework, the arrival of Zara Dew (our rescue pup), fancy dinners, simple dinners, solid sleeps, and so on.
The stairwell received new consecutive pieces for a good two to three months. Then, life, ADHD, boredom, lack of drive, and other new things settled in. So, the doodles took a hard time out. To be clear, they didn’t come down; we just stopped making new ones.
Then, on a particularly rough day, when I very much did not feel like I had the energy to venture from my bed to the basement to rerun a load of wet laundry that had been sitting in the washing machine for too many days to count (no exaggeration), I mustered the strength to get from the bed to the stairwell. And there I lingered.
I stayed stuck on the doodle of the incense. I realized that in addition to not remembering when I started the load of laundry that needed to be rerun, I also couldn’t remember the last time I burned incense.
But I love incense.
I then made a deal with myself that if I reran the laundry, I could reward myself with an unscheduled field trip to Dollar Tree for the grand purchase of three boxes of incense.
That day, all the laundry got done (like washed, dried, folded, put away, done). Incense was burned, and the doodles even returned for a stint.
Today, I discovered that for the first time in a long time, I’m out of incense and post-its. And still, I got the urge to reboot the Joy-it wall, so I did—with a notecard.
