Twinkle Lights

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments—often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times we’re so afraid of the dark that we don’t dare let ourselves enjoy the light.
— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (2010)

On October 22nd, we introduced Brené Brown’s ten guideposts for wholehearted living. Today we continue with Guidepost #4: Cultivating Gratitude and Joy—Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark.

Brown writes that she always assumed joyful people were grateful because they had so much to be grateful for. Her research revealed the opposite: without exception, every person she interviewed who described living a joyful life actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to that practice. Gratitude isn’t a byproduct of joy—it’s the source.

But there’s a crucial word here: practice. Brown admits she once believed in an “attitude of gratitude”—but an attitude without action is like having a yoga outfit without ever stepping onto the mat. The wholehearted don’t just feel grateful; they do gratitude. They keep journals, pause in the middle of chaotic days to say aloud “I am grateful for…,” and build rituals that anchor them to what’s real. Gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works—it’s not alive.

Joy, Brown discovered, is different from happiness. Happiness is tied to circumstances—it ebbs and flows with external events. Joy is tethered to spirit and gratitude. It’s what the ancient Greeks called chairo—”the culmination of being,” found through virtue and wisdom. Its opposite isn’t sadness; it’s fear.

And here lies the problem: joy is terrifyingly vulnerable. How many of us have stood in a moment of pure connection—watching someone we love sleep, or feeling overwhelmed by beauty—only to be ambushed by images of loss? We picture the accident, the diagnosis, the phone call in the night. Brown calls this “foreboding joy”—the belief that if we let ourselves feel too much happiness, we’re inviting disaster. So we rehearse tragedy instead.

People in recovery know this pattern intimately. We spent years numbing joy because we couldn’t tolerate vulnerability. The irony is brutal: the very joy we’re afraid to feel is what sustains us through the hard times we’re bracing for.

There’s another barrier: scarcity. As Lynne Twist writes in The Soul of Money, most of us wake up already behind—not enough sleep, not enough time, not enough money, not thin enough, not successful enough. We go to bed haunted by what we didn’t get done. Scarcity becomes the water we swim in. And when we’re starving for “enough,” we have no capacity for gratitude.

But Brown reminds us: we don’t overcome scarcity by chasing abundance. We overcome it by practicing sufficiency—the conscious awareness that we have enough, that we are enough. It’s the choice to stop running after extraordinary moments long enough to recognize the ordinary ones strung before us like twinkle lights.

A joyful life is not a floodlight. It’s ordinary moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith. The work isn’t to eliminate vulnerability—it’s to transform it into gratitude before fear can take hold.

The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.