WTL Issue 018 | February 25, 2026 |
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Rediscovering Joy
Lessons from the Long Haul
The garage door opened straight into our kitchen, revealing white and yellow speckled linoleum that had seen a thousand muddy boots. In far less time than it took to bundle up, I’d shed hats and mittens and coats to a lower row of metal hooks, kicked snow boots onto the drying rail my dad had built over the baseboard heater. Then down the worn wood stairs, I’d go, cheeks burning red, hair full of static electricity.
Below was our territory. The unfinished basement hummed with utility sounds: washing machine cycles, the boiler’s steady rumble. It stayed warm in winter when snow piled high outside, cool when summer heat pressed against the house above. Two surplus public school desks sat on overlapping circular rag rugs alongside a low table ringed with kid-sized metal chairs. One of many places we learned.
My mother became my first teacher in her second career. The first brought her to an Interior region village along the Yukon River where she met my dad. She's lived in Alaska since. We learned in that basement schoolroom, her lessons infused with her love of science, math, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Homeschooling meant no long hours trapped at desks. We spend daylight hours building snow forts in the front yard, skating at the rink, sprawled in the public library's sunken reading pit.
This gave me an understanding of rhythm, the value of breaking up the day. Outside time. Play time. Creative time. Deep thinking time. Bins of Legos and thousand-piece Jigsaw puzzles. Hours-long Monopoly games. Tools to take apart a broken wind-up alarm clock just to see how it worked.
Years later, as teenagers juggling nordic skiing and cross-country running and swim practices, we'd rake leaves and leap. We'd invent outdoor games that sent us racing through wooded trails. We'd drive around the hills listening to mixed tapes of Nirvana, Weezer, and the Fugees that matched our moody teenage angst.
Some of these activities might look different for you now. Some might be exactly the same. I recently rediscovered jigsaw puzzles. I've cycled through stints of knitting, crocheting, and sewing clothing. The specifics matter less than this: remembering what brings you joy outside of work, then cultivating those interests and protecting time to enable doing them again.
Field-Tested: Finding Your Joy
Start by noticing the glimmers, those little things that happen, maybe daily, that cause you to pause. Something that holds your attention. The details.
Reflect back on how you spent time during childhood. What did you return to again and again?
Write down 3 glimmers each day for a week. See what threads emerge.
Try something completely new as an experiment. For me, that meant memoir writing classes during the pandemic and watercolor for the first time last year.
Consider laughter as medicine. What makes you laugh? I went to “The Play That Goes Wrong”. Laughing for two hours made me feel lighter. I’m working to find that feeling more often.
Map your climate work to joy:
In climate work, I return to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s climate action Venn diagram: What brings you joy? What are you good at? What work needs doing?
She has a downloadable worksheet and a TedX talk to help you work through these questions. Once you have ideas at the nexus of those three things, check out the Project Drawdown Explorer to browse climate solutions worth your attention.
The lovely graphic is by Nicole Kelner, who teaches climate art workshops and whose new book “Quietest Places in New York City” just launched.
Create space for what you discover:
Once you know what brings you joy, the hardest part is protecting time for it. Start small. Block 30 minutes this week for something that’s purely for joy, not productivity. Let it be imperfect. Messy even. Let it be just for you.
Signals & Shifts
If you’re interested in watercolor and are local to Seattle, Nathaly Lerma of Flor de Cactus Studio teaches in-person classes. Spending an evening in community with others learning to work with metallic watercolors was what my soul needed this winter.
Grist’s weekly newsletter “Looking Forward” focuses on climate solutions and inspiration, inviting readers to submit 100-word climate future vignettes. Climate expert and McSweeney’s contributor Tom Ellison is teaching a humor writing workshop on May 2, if you’re interested.
Question for reflection: What brought you joy as a child that you’ve let slip away?
Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.
Nikoosh
Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.
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