Anticipatory Joy, Resilience, and Mourning Doves

This morning, my partner and I rushed to get ourselves settled in for the 10:45 am breakout session of the 2025 Cancer Survivorship Conference titled, The Psychological Impact of Cancer. But because time zones are my nemesis, it turned out to have been at 9:45 am

ugh.

But, also, pretty on brand for us and that’s funny to me.

So instead of watching a live event now over, we wandered over to YouTube and found a video titled A Simple Spring Mindset Shift for More Joy by

Jennifer Tatroe. Clearly not the same topic, but also totally close enough. The thumbnail for it

Joy = Resilience after all.

In this video, Jenn shared what she learned from Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, written by Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff. I appreciated her simple and to-the-point summation of the material, boiling it down to:

“Saving = Mindfulness of good experiences” – Jennifer Tatroe

She also discussed Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. I connected with this concept as it adjacent to how I’ve been most successful at learning new information and building new habits: building up from existing foundations. If I can connect a new concept or factoid to an appropriate piece of existing information, I’m much more likely to retain and integrate it.

The same goes for habit building, if I can connect the new habit I want to build to an existing habit, it’s much more likely to stick and eventually become automatic. For example, I struggled to remember to take my morning meds for quite a while. Finally, I came up with the idea to pick up my morning medication container at the same time I pick up my evening one (I’ve got two of those 7-day compartment medication containers) and put it on my rollator tray in the evening. This has been working fantastically because I connected it to something I was already doing.

Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-board theory is summarized by Jenn as:

“Positive emotions give us the space and ability to choose from a more comprehensive and growth-oriented list of options.” – Jennifer Tatroe

Essentially, with positive emotions we are less likely to explore, to play, to daydream, and, perhaps most importantly, less likely to be flexible problem solvers and so less resilient.

Life can be so, so very hard, resilience allows us to find joy and connection and solutions.

Resilience is one of the most important skill sets we can build for ourselves. It’s resilience that empowered me to find gratitude for so much even when I was first diagnosed with a rare cancer that “is highly malignant with an adverse prognosis.”

Now, it’s not that I don’t have my down days, because I totally have days where I feel completely fucked over and doomed for sure. I think that’s normal and healthy.

It’s that the layers of resilience I’ve built up empower me to find joy, stay curious and hopeful (while realistic).

Resilience doesn’t mean I never get the wind knocked out of me. What it does means is that when I get knocked down, I’m now often able to stay present, to feel my feelings, and then dust myself off and get up again.

Oh, and Jenn also said, about mindfulness: “I want to know that it’s Spring.”

I felt that deep in my belly.

Whether I have 30 or 3 years left, I want to be here, in my actual life, noticing and experiencing joy as able.

I’m thinking now about what Spring items can I note down in my journal that I’m looking forward to. hmmmmm….

Longer days are an easy one, living in the Pacific Northwest it gets dark EARLY in Winter, like 4ish on overcast days. Longer days that usually also have more sun are medicine.
The hedge outside my window will soon be a hubbub of activity of little birds. Are they Swallow? Thrush? Wren? Whatever they are, I adore them. Watching them brings me into the present moment, where joy dwells.
Oh, and Spring will also soon bring the return of the utterly enchanting sounds of Mourning Doves cooing in the mornings. Plus, thanks to rising overnight temperatures, I’ll soon be able to sleep with the window cracked open so that I can hear them when I wake up.

I’m noticing that the 3 items listed above are all things I experience from bed. This is another aspect of resilience: radical acceptance and the adaptability it provides. In accepting that this body currently needs to spend the vast majority of time in bed, I’m able to adapt what I’m looking most forward to so that it reflects moments that are accessible to me.

I’m still a work in progress on being in the moment and noticing joy from bed. I have plenty of minutes, hours, days where I get caught up in resentment and anger over having to spend the majority of my time in this one room, on this bed. I think that’s also probably normal and healthy. My limitations have grown so much, of course I’ll have times when I resent them and long for the freedom of movement and creative focus I used to have. It’s in the acceptance of these feelings that comes the ability to feel them without being trapped inside them – the freedom to feel them and then let them move on, returning to being present, finding joy.

That’s the power of radical acceptance that helps me be resilient enough to say, “Oh well, it is what it is, guess I’ll figure out how to make writing from bed more accessible because I’m sure as hell not giving up.”

I love how the more you build your resilience muscles the more radical acceptance you allow in and that then allows your reilience to expand yet again – if that makes any sense.

It’s a rad little positive growth loop.

Oh, and here’s Jenn’s video, I encourage you to give yourself the gift of spending 8 minutes with her here: