On your path to joy be prepared for pushback. You are making time for reading, exploring, taking classes, attending seminars and concerts, writing and communicating with new people. You have disrupted the pattern of what was your ordinary day.

Others in your life may want to interrupt your set times for reading or walking or writing or visiting places in the community. You will need to defend your boundaries.

You may be the one who wants to postpone or cut short your explorations and new activities to revert to your old patterns. Moving on your new choices is sometimes fun and sometimes frightening. Your feelings of isolation, dullness, bewilderment

*You may not recognize your path to joy yet. Now is your time to become a spiritual explorer in the pragmatic world.

The appearance and details of the path to joy are different for each of us, yet the pattern and method are similar.
                        
To explore start with these steps.

1. look for clues that are nearby. Your heart and soul may be barricaded by a stiff dry chrysalis, but clues leave a trace. And the chrysalis is breaking down.
2. Do you have secret longings? Write them down.
3. What have you procrastinated for months or years or your entire life? Write them down.
4. What little items have you found or purchased that mean a lot to you, even if you don’t know why? Look at them. Muse about them. Let your imagination

Choices exist in this world. Do you know what your choices are? Your path beckons.*

First is your choice to either keep living as you are living or move toward freedom and change.

If you continue to follow your routine in a life that is unhappy, neglect your yearning and fulfill the expectations of others you will maintain your status quo and gradually feel worse. If you can’t find your way to change you may try to distract yourself with activities and substances or temporary and short-lived thrills. When you emerge, you see nothing improved and your life may have disintegrated more during your absence. 

*The caterpillar may lead a joyous life, but at the end of the life cycle it goes into reclusion for transformation. That may be joyous until the change is complete. Now the new being works its way into a different life as the worn out chyrsalis crumbles.

A quiet self-talk statement to keep yourself centered and awake is this:  I can find my path to joy.

Bored? Restless? Lonely? Feeling guilty about wasting time? Overeating? Starving? Numbing yourself in bars? Sex becoming dull? People uninteresting?

You weren’t always like this.