Sometimes days of routine pass.
I meditate. I care for myself. I lift. I eat well.
The routine is smooth and peaceful.

And then I have weeks like this one.
Weeks in which the universe has decided it is time for enlightenment.

On Monday I was listening to Brené Brown talk about gratitude and joy.
She used a quote from David Steindl-Rast

“The root of joy is gratefulness… It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”

That in and of itself did not ring any alarm bells.
The quote was framed and placed on a shelf in the library of my mind.
There to be seen, already noted as important, saved for future reference.

Today I was driving to a family wedding.
The Boy was sitting to my left, eating chicken and noodles with chop sticks.
5 minutes earlier he had asked me, while I was driving, how to use chop sticks!
I had shown him the placement of the sticks, using a nail file and a tweezers, and left him off to do it.

I changed lanes and the change in road surface caused the car to jiggle.
He continued to eat.

I will take a moment here to say that at various times in the last 5 years I have asked Google some random questions.
One of them being

“where do I find my joy?”

Needless to say Google had no answer for me.

In the same time frame that I was asking Google for the GPS location of my joy, The Boy was struggling with being alive.
Everything hurt.
Putting on socks was too hard some days.
Everything took too much energy and he was living in a world full of rough edges and sharp corners.
Everything frustrated him.

And so back to today.

As I drove with him eating beside me I became so grateful for the work we have done,
for the progress he has made,
for his self found ability to deal with frustration
and like a tidal wave following the gratitude
I was overcome with joy.

Me: There are moments when I am just so incredibly grateful for all the improvements and all of the work that we did and it fills me with such joy
Him: because the road is bumpy and I am able to eat without getting frustrated?

And with that I had the second wave,
the after shock of more gratitude for his self awareness,
and the joy that followed.

There is no way that Google could ever have told me where to find my joy.