Ingrid Fetell Lee

Did anyone else see it?

I was the Nancy Drew of joy.

And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again.

They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles, swimming pools and tree houses, hot air balloons and googly eyes and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles.

These things seem to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity.

I mean, if you think about it, we all stop and turn our heads to the sky when the multicolored arc of a rainbow streaks across it.

And fireworks.

We don't even need to know what they're for, and we feel like we're celebrating, too.

These things aren't joyful for just a few people.

They're joyful for nearly everyone.

They're universally joyful.

And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling.

The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable.

And yet underneath it all, there's a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things.

And though we're often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they're really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world.

But I still needed to know, what is it about these things that makes them so joyful?

I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day I would come in and try to make sense of it.

And then one day, something just clicked.

I saw all these patterns.

Round things, pops of bright color, symmetrical shapes, a sense of abundance and multiplicity, a feeling of lightness or elevation.