Dr Michelle O'Driscoll: Find what brings you joy... and do more of it!

LAST week, I did something I hadn’t done in quite a while. I attended a concert.

It wasn’t just a usual concert though, it was a Candlelight Concert held in the beautiful St Peter’s Church on North Main Street. I’d walked past that building so many times and barely taken stock of it, but that night, turning in at the little gate, the place looked so beautiful, with hundreds of candles (albeit battery-operated for safety sake!) lining the walkways and either side of the audience.

The crowd was growing, as others like ourselves, who were taking a little time out of a busy week, gathered and found their seats in the atmospheric venue.

I had purchased the tickets last summer – an advertisement had popped up randomly on social media, tickets were inexpensive, and I had booked without much more thought other than “wouldn’t that be lovely?”

At that time, my youngest was still small enough that evenings out of the house were not very feasible, and I thought of how the future me, who gets to pop out to something like that a lot more easily, would thank me for arranging it.

It was only the week beforehand that I even remembered I had booked it, which ended up being a lovely surprise! Dinners were made, wash-up was done, and we escaped the house just in time to find parking and take our seats.

It was an hour of incredibly beautiful music. The Munster String Quartet treated us to a selection of Coldplay hits, which had me glued from the first few moments. The musicianship was perfect, the emotion was palpable.

As dramatic as it sounds, I spent the hour completely present and in the moment, feeling every crescendo and vibrato. 

All the deadlines, pressure and guilt of being sat there on a week night when there were things to do and jobs to finish fell away. We were home and back on the couch for 9pm, but those couple of hours were enough to have got me reflecting.

And in the days that followed, as I rediscovered instrumental versions of my favourite artists on Spotify, I thought a lot about what brings me joy, what brings us joy. How much or little room we make for that in daily life. And what we can do to do more of it.

I’ve always loved music, and rushing home from a bad day at school to play all the stress out on the piano was my therapy. Immersing myself in the rhythm and structure, as well as the flow and freeness of it, had become just a distant memory in recent years.

Similarly, listening to music of any sort really was something that I used to spend a lot of time doing, but rarely anymore had I reached for my headphones unless it was for a work purpose.

The Candlelight Concert, and how content it had made me feel, prompted me to revisit all of this. Sitting at the piano, my fingers still have some muscle memory (far from enough to play anything very well right now!) but even just the process of figuring out what those muscles should be doing again brought me great joy this week. That route to joy hasn’t disappeared, it had just stepped into the shadows slightly.

And changing the soundtrack in the car from random radio to more purposely chosen music that I enjoy has also helped to brighten the mornings.

What brings us joy often gets squeezed out of a busy schedule. What is that for you? Is it attending a match? Cycling? Running? Gardening? Reading? Taking a morning to head off hiking? Dedicated time with parents or grandchildren? These things aren’t frivolous, they’re a pressure valve. And we know that without one, there’s a build-up of air and an inevitable explosion. We need the outlet in our lives, and we need it regularly.

But I think it’s fair to say we often aren’t really even sure what that outlet should look like, not to mind manage to make the time for it!

As we stood in applause in the candlelight for the wonderful string quartet, they rounded things off with Coldplay’s famous hit Viva La Vida, which ironically translates into “long live life”. It’s since got me thinking about what we need to do to be able to say we’re “living life,” and what small change could we be making to get one step closer to that.

What brings you joy? So let this be your reminder to start considering that question and working towards more of it where we can.

About the author Dr Michelle O’Driscoll is a pharmacist, re searcher and founder of InTuition, a health and wellness education company. Her research lies in the area of mental health education, and through InTuition she delivers health promotion workshops to corporate and academic organisations nationally.