A couple of years ago, I had an argument with my grandmother over her perfectly cooked pink salmon. While I don’t remember the specifics, I know that we disagreed on the meaning of the word “alegría,” which means “joy” in Spanish. I think she thought of joy as something fleeting, an emotion that can be experienced in specific, easily recalled moments.
I argued that the word she was looking for was happiness, while joy is something deeper—a mindset or approach to life that is consistent and founded in choice instead of chance. For me, joy is about a series of choices made several hundred times every day. It is in our ability to choose who and what we let affect us and what we choose to believe about ourselves.
At a school like Boston College, it is easy to find people grinding in the library at any time of the day or go down a LinkedIn rabbit hole where everyone is “so thrilled to announce” their newest job position, published paper, or research findings. It starts to feel like there is an elusive key, an answer that everyone else has to that million-dollar question: “What do you want to do?” or “What comes next for you?”
As a senior, there is an increasing sense of urgency to secure the perfect job in the right city, soak up every waning second of living with our 2,500 classmates, and be a student for what may be the last time. Some are ready to begin the next chapter, but most are not.
Yesterday a friend said, “I have to become ‘adult me.’ I’ll never be this way again.” I rushed to say, “You’re still you though!” If we see graduating and whatever comes after that as the end of who we are, we do ourselves a disservice. I would hate to see my life peak at 21 years old. Wouldn’t you?
Aside from paying bills, living somewhere new, and continuing to study, work, or volunteer, one of the biggest post-grad challenges is having to intentionally carve time out for hobbies and spending time with people. It’s different, but it might not be such a bad thing.
Instead of asking someone to get lunch at Lower, you get to be creative and develop experiences to get to know people. Instead of running from a class to a club meeting to a networking event, you might be able to join an improv group, work a second job, or take up painting again. Instead of walking around the Res for the 6,789,534th time, you can explore a new place or get to know your hometown in a fresh way.
While the job market is worrying and you might not even know what you want to pursue, we are lucky to be graduating from BC, something that will inevitably open up a wide range of options and opportunities unavailable to most. The question then lies in how to find joy, regardless of place or situation.
At some point in the last four years, I realized that joy is both discovered and chosen. Joy is not blind optimism. It is not naive. There are bad days and good days, devastating years and golden decades. People who practice joy are those who do not change their approach to each day, throughout each decade, despite the external circumstances or factors that may be at play in their life.
My mom is joyful. She experiences hurt, grief, frustration, and anger just like the rest of us, but she wakes up each day and operates on the belief that she is good and that life is good, that there is something good in every day. This belief is evident in the way she treats everyone with the utmost respect and kindness, her ability to turn people’s tears into laughter, and in the very little time she spends thinking about herself. She chooses joy, especially when it is most difficult to do so.
But joy can also be sought out. You don’t have to buy plane tickets to a tropical destination, quit your job, delete social media, or channel an Inside Out character. It means making small changes in your day-to-day life that lead to experiencing joy as a constant, underlying force. Two summers ago, I was back home, a little bored, and free long before my parents were done working for the day. I wanted to do something special for them and my siblings without interrupting the evening routine or spending a lot of money.
I decided dinner would be replaced by an evening in Paris. I dug up some escargot, which was being saved for a special occasion from the freezer, bought a baguette and some macarons, wrangled my three siblings into their Sunday best, and convinced (probably bribed) them into finding candles and making seating cards. We jumped our parents as soon as they opened the door, and they indulged us in closing their eyes and walking to the backyard, as the warm sounds of Ratatouille’s “Le Festin” and Édith Piaf filled the air. We ate and talked, and that night became the first of several themed dinners that summer.
It sounds cliché and might not be for you, but joy and surprise can take so many different forms. Joy is on the other side of caring whether something is cliché or not, refusing to give other people power over what you enjoy. If you want to have the kind of friend group that throws crazy wine nights, buy some wine and tell your friends to come. If you’ve always wanted to go on a road trip, start by pulling up maps and figuring out where you want to go. Maybe all you do is switch up the way you walk to class, eat eggs instead of cereal for breakfast, wear something you usually wouldn’t, or read on a bench instead of in your bed—these little disruptions add up to remind us that we have a choice in how we spend our time and how we live.
You are not confined to the way you’ve always done things or the way you think you should do things. Joy is in your hands.
