Reading aboutways to foster joylast week (I know, most of us would settle for waking without lingering dread, but why not dream big occasionally?), I was captivated by the memoirist and cancer survivor Suleika Jaouad’s suggestion: live each day like it’s your first. When Jaouad’s leukaemia returned last year, well-wishers urged her to live each day like it was her last, but the pressure tocarpeeach second of every damndiemleft her feeling panicked and exhausted. Instead, she cultivated a sense of freshly hatched curiosity and playfulness, which she says helped.
I loved this, but doubted the feasibility – can you really convince your tired, cynical self to feel joyful astonishment? I tried living yesterday as if it were my first; not like an actual newborn (red-faced, frequently crying, utterly incompetent – I’m all that already), but with childlike wonder. I had some success being captivated by my breakfast banana – great design and colour – and even more with the magical elixir that makes me not hate everyone (coffee).
Then I opened the postbox with Christmas-stocking levels of anticipation: a window cleaner’s card and an HMRC letter about Making Tax Digital! After lunch, confronted with our dishwasher’s habit of popping open whenever I try to shut it, I attempted to cultivate curiosity rather than rage: surely this helpful marvel has its reasons? What might they be? I was left no wiser but marginally calmer.
Living a dental hygienist appointment as if it were my first proved more challenging: my body remembered this was not my first scratchy hook and humiliation rodeo, whatever my brain tried to tell it. But a sense of playful discovery did help, sort of. I distracted myself beforehand, flicking in wide-eyed amazement through tooth makeovers in the waiting room brochure. Then, in the chair, I surrendered, childlike, to the transporting strangeness of cold gritty stuff blasting my molars, my tongue getting accidentally sucked into the spit-hoover and what I chose to tell myself was the “intensely interesting sensation” of manual plaque removal.
I wouldn’t call it a joy, exactly, but it was absolutely less of an ordeal. Jaouad is right: a sense of wonder can be, well, wonderful.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist