I want to share an indirect approach—a kind of back-door strategy—to finding your secret cheerfulness.
This idea comes from one of my favorite poets David Whyte. He tells a story about a time when he was working for a non-profit organization in the United Kingdom that was dedicated to protecting salmon and their habitat. He said for months he had been working long hours and fighting the fights that activists do, and he was exhausted. He 
says he had forgotten, in a sense, why he was even working there. It occurred to him to sit down and lay out, on paper, all the ways that he hadn’t thought about the salmon. And he said, as he did that, he was immediately back in touch with them. He said, “Isn’t that astonishing? As human beings, we have this immediate gateway. You’ve just to articulate exactly the way that you’re exiled—exactly the way that you don’t belong—exactly the way that you can’t love—exactly the way that you can’t move—and you’re on your way again; you’re on your way home. . . . If you’ve said it—if you can just say exactly the way you are in prison, the door swings open.”
Perhaps we need only to describe exactly how we can’t be cheerful, to see how we can.
I will read you the poem David Whyte wrote after that exercise. I encourage you to pay attention to all the little details that must have come to his mind as he tried to think about all the ways he had not thought about the salmon.
Song For the Salmon
For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands
For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn
I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.
I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.
I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.
But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.
If you sat down to write a poem about all the ways you are exiled from being cheerful, what details might you remember? For me, it’s the way my to-do list doesn’t seem quite so long, the presence I feel in each moment, the greater capacity I have to give and to love, the confidence I feel that everything will be okay. Somehow, trying to remember what we have forgotten about being cheerful can bring those feelings back to the surface in a profound and immediate way.
Editor’s Note: This is a post in an ongoing series on how to flourish. Posts are published on Tuesdays.