It’s so true that you need to fill your life with things that bring you joy.  The older I get, the more I have learned to get rid of the “filler” and fill my life as much as possible with good.  Have you read Marie Kondo’s “Spark Joy” or “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”?  You should.  And while these books speak to a way to declutter your environment, and therefore your life, what they really did for me was to make me look through the lenses of importance and priorities.

Marie Kondo recommends that if you’re decluttering, you should hold the item and see if you feel joy.  No joy?  Get rid of it.  Joy?  It stays.  You can apply this principle to life in general.  Friends.  Obligations.  Career.  Living situation.  Lifestyle.

Joy = stays.  No joy = goes.

This is a short post for you today, but as I sat on my couch to write, my mind kept wandering back to joy.  I always try to write about what’s closest to my heart in the moment, and the purpose of this blog has always been to show you who I am, so that you can get to know me.  Because if you know me better, you’ll trust me more, and it makes sense to me that better doctor/patient relationships equal better treatment outcomes.  And what’s closest to my heart right now is joy.  You see, we have a family friend who is nearing the end of her life, and I can promise you that she’s not thinking about how big her house is or how clean her floors are or what her hair looks like.  I hope that she’s thinking about the things that brought her joy through her seventy-something years of life.

So, fill it up friends.  Fill up your lives with joy, whatever that joy may look like to you  (because psssst…… joy looks different to all of us).