The Script or the Soul
What buying the flowers, leaving early, and choosing yourself has to do with joy.
We have spent a handful of posts together exploring some fairly weighty territory. Socrates and his hemlock. The arrival fallacy. The invisible villain of auto-pilot. The full emotional spectrum mapped on a scale and what your grief is trying to tell you.
All of it true. All of it important. All topics I love to wax poetic out about.
But also—sometimes the most philosophical among us are the ones who are spectacularly dropping the ball when it comes to actual blood-sweat-and-tears LIVING. We are excellent at thinking about life. (Gemini here, key phrase = “I think”.) We are connoisseurs of the examined existence. We can discourse at length on the nature of joy while simultaneously forgetting to experience any.
At least I can. Tell me I’m not alone.
So today we are doing something different. Today we are putting down the philosophy, stepping away from the big ideas, and talking about something small, immediate, and slightly ridiculous.
Today we are talking about tiny rebellion.
Somewhere along the way, rebellion got rebranded as something loud.
Protest marches. Dramatic exits. Burning things down—metaphorically and, occasionally, literally—and announcing yourself to the world as someone who refuses to be contained.
I’m not against any of that. There’s a time and a place for the grand gesture, the bold declaration, the life-altering leap.
But I think we’ve collectively missed something important in our obsession with the dramatic version of rebellion.
We have overlooked the power of quiet rebellions. The tiny ones. The ones that nobody sees and nobody applauds and nobody writes a screenplay about. The ones that happen in the space of an ordinary Tuesday and leave you feeling, inexplicably, like yourself again.
These, I argue, are where the real revolution lives.
Order the thing on the menu you actually want instead of the sensible option. You know the one. The one your eyes went to first before your internal committee convened and overruled you with something more reasonable.
Leave a party when you want to leave. Not when it’s polite to leave, not when you’ve stayed long enough that your exit won’t be noted, not after one more drink you didn’t want. When YOU want to leave. Put your coat on. Map out your route to the exit, and go.
Say no to something this week with no explanation attached. Not “I can’t make it because...” Not “I’d love to but unfortunately...” Just no. Warm, complete, requiring nothing further. No is a full sentence and using it without footnotes is, in certain social contexts, practically anarchic.
Buy the flowers for yourself. Not because it’s your birthday, not because you’ve achieved something worthy of celebration, not because you need a reason. Because they’re yellow and they make you smile and you don’t need a reason.
Read the book that has nothing to do with self-improvement or professional development or becoming a better version of yourself. The delicious, pointless, completely absorbing novel that exists purely to be enjoyed. Let yourself enjoy it without the faint background hum of productivity guilt. (Sidenote: wanna talk books? I can talk books!)
Take the long way home.
Eat breakfast for dinner.
Dance in your kitchen to a song from 1987 with absolutely nobody watching. Commit to it. Elbows and everything.
Wear the good perfume on a Wednesday. Not for a special occasion. Wednesday IS the special occasion. Wednesday has always been the special occasion. We’ve just been saving the good perfume for a day that feels more deserving, and I am here to tell you that day is not coming and Wednesday is RIGHT HERE.
Alright, so you might be thinking, this is nice, Aj, but is choosing the pasta really a rebellion?
Yes. 100%, yes.
Here’s why.
Auto-pilot—read more here—doesn’t just operate at the level of career choices and relationship patterns and inherited belief systems. It operates at the level of every single micro-decision you make across the course of an ordinary day.
The sensible menu option. The polite extra hour at the party. The explanatory paragraph attached to every no. The flowers you didn’t buy yourself. The good perfume sitting on the shelf.
Each of these tiny moments is a fork in the road. A choice between the default and the deliberate. Between the script and the soul.
And here’s the thing about micro-decisions….they compound. Not dramatically, not overnight, but in that slow, undeniable way that water shapes stone. A hundred tiny moments of choosing yourself, over weeks and months and years, quietly, incrementally, reshapes your entire relationship with your own life.
This is what I mean by joy as a practice. It’s not waiting for the transcendent experience. It’s not the meditation retreat or the sabbatical or the lightning bolt of clarity that rearranges everything at once.
It’s staying up past your bedtime with a good book. Asking for a raincheck on brunch because it was a long week and a hot bath with bubbles is calling your name. Taking the scenic route because your favorite band sounds better on the open road, played through the car speakers.
It’s choosing, in the smallest possible moment, to be HERE rather than somewhere more sensible and considerably less alive.
Before this week is out, I implore you to commit to one tiny rebellion.
Genuinely tiny. Embarrassingly small. The kind of thing that takes less than five minutes and costs less than grocery store daisies.
And I want you to notice, really notice, how it feels. Not the action itself, but the moment just after. The subtle, almost imperceptible shift in your body when you chose the thing you actually wanted instead of the thing you were supposed to want.
That feeling? That tiny flicker of aliveness?
That’s JOY. And she’s been waiting for you. Random, unexpected joy is delightful. A wink from the universe. But joy you choose, name, seek out, insist upon? Life-changing.
I have done some drastic things to change my life. I got married, divorced, too. I have moved soooo many times it borders on insanity—different states, towns, sometimes just a few neighborhoods over. I have chopped my hair really short, simply because it felt bold at the time. Making the conscious decision to illuminate joy in the everyday mundanity of life has been the most gentle and lasting way I have ever enacted change. Two thumbs up, 5-stars, it has my whole-hearted stamp of approval.
Curious about being the architect of your own reality and the intentional act of choosing joy? Consider starting here.