What brings you joy?

This post first appeared in our weekly Make Waves Mondays email series on September 6, 2021, and was updated and re-shared again on May 5, 2025.

“What brings you joy?”

Once upon a time a friend posed this question to me, and I didn’t have an answer.

I didn’t know what brings me joy.

Joy. The word elicits beautiful images of uncontainable smiles, belly laughs, and that sense of deep happiness that you feel all the way in the corners of your soul.

But at the time, I had no idea what actually brought me joy.

I’m not sure why this question slithered its way back into my brain this weekend, but as I was washing my face Saturday night after a girls night out, there it was.

What brings me joy? 
What brings my people joy?

With everything happening in the world right now, I believe that it's truly imperative we find those things that bring us joy.

Our friends from Yoga Wild used the phrase "self care for collective care." We cannot care for each other and our planet if we aren't caring for ourselves first. We cannot pour from an empty cup.

I believe finding our joy is a form of self care.

For me, a few of the things that bring me joy are:

💙  Dancing - whether at my weekly Zumba class or barefoot in my kitchen
💙  Sitting or walking along the waterfront
💙  This completely improvised musical
💙  Playing board games with my partner
💙  Strolling through the zoo or aquarium
💙  Caring for my plant babies
💙  Reading our Google Reviews (I’m not ashamed to admit I read them often 🥰)
💙  Sitting on the porch drinking my morning coffee
💙  Listening to 8D music through headphones
💙  Hosting friends for a meal

I know this isn’t our usual blog format, and I pinky promise next week we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled eco-tips and tricks, but this week, I want to encourage you to take some time with this question.

What brings you joy?

Make a list. Keep it somewhere you can reference it easily. When you’re feeling the weight of ~all the things~, pull it out, pick one thing, and do it.

We gotta keep doing the hard things: calling our reps, showing up at protests, supporting ethical businesses and boycotting the unethical ones, volunteering in our community, and just all-around advocating for the world we want to live in.

But it’s so important to find those moments of joy, too. The moments of joy are what keeps us going.

I recently heard this quote from author Dan Savage as it’s been circulating the interwebs:

“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we would win then…but we did. Right now it doesn’t feel like we can win, but we can. But only if we fight…and dance.”

So, friend, today I implore you to ask yourself… What brings me joy?

If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear what brings you joy. Just comment below and share with me 💙

Sending you all my love.