Hello!
I met Pat Shea for the first time at a lunch during a Marshall Goldsmith 100 event.
There were ten or so people there but, somehow, the connection between us was so electric that they all vanished into the background and it seemed as if there were only the two of us there.
We have been good friends ever since.
You can learn more about Pat Shea and what motivates her here and here.
In a recent conversation Pat told me about how she used to drop her son, Zachary, off to school every day. And each day she would tell him, “There is joy in every day. Find it.”
In her mind she was playing with him and he would respond with a non sequitur like “We will have pizza for dinner.”
Fast forward a few decades and Pat had car trouble. So Zachary dropped her off at work. She was grumpy. Zachary leaned over and told her, “Mom, there is joy in every day. Find it.”
Pat was floored. She had not realized, all those years ago, that her words were landing. That they were taking root in the fertile soil of a young mind and quietly growing into something that would one day come back to her — in her own voice, from her own child — at precisely the moment she needed to hear them.
Zachary told her something else that morning. He told her that as he had moved through his life — through school, through college, through the inevitable turbulences of early adulthood — he had watched many of his friends struggle. He had seen people he cared about sink into depression, into dejection, into a grey and heavy relationship with ordinary days. He had watched them wait for circumstances to improve before they allowed themselves to feel anything resembling happiness. He had watched them defer joy to some future moment that never quite arrived.
He had not been immune to difficulty himself. Life had handed him its share of hard seasons. But somewhere in those hard seasons, a voice would surface. A familiar voice, from a school-run morning long ago. There is joy in every day. Find it.
And he would find it. Not always immediately. Not always easily. But he would find it — because he had been taught, from the time he was small, that it was there to be found. That joy was not a reward for a life going well. It was a practice. A discipline. A choice made freshly each morning
Sit with this for a moment, because there is something here that goes deeper than a charming story about a mother and her son.
Most of us operate on what I call the if-then model of happiness. If I close this deal, then I will be happy. If my children are settled, then I will be at peace. If the circumstances align just so, then I will allow myself to feel joy. We treat happiness as a destination — something we arrive at once the conditions are right.
The conditions are never entirely right. There is always something unresolved, something pending, something that could be better. If we wait for perfection before we permit ourselves joy, we will wait forever.
What Pat gave Zachary — perhaps without fully realizing the magnitude of the gift — was a completely different operating system. Not joy will come when things improve. But joy is available right now, in this ordinary day, and your job is to find it.
This is, in fact, one of the oldest teachings in the contemplative traditions. The Stoics called it the practice of amor fati — the love of what is. The Buddhist traditions speak of the beginner’s mind that finds freshness in the familiar. The Vedantic sages pointed again and again to the fullness that is always present, beneath the noise of craving and complaint.
Zachary did not know any of this as a small boy eating pizza and climbing into a car each morning. He simply had a mother who told him, every single day, that joy was there. Waiting. Available. His to claim.
And one grey morning, when his mother had forgotten her own teaching, he gave it back to her.
I will leave you with a question — not a rhetorical one, but one worth genuinely sitting with today.
What is the joy in this day?
Not in some future day when things are resolved and the path is clear. This day. The one you are actually living.
It is there. Pat Shea knew it. Zachary proved it.
Go find it.
Peace!
