Reading about ways to foster joy last 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 to carpe each second of every damn diem left 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
