Ilustration: Pixabay 
I went out for dinner recently with two old friends. We used to spend hours getting ready together and go out dancing and debate the merits of the boys on the dancefloor and who was worthy of kissing.
Now, over tacos, we discussed our ailing parents: cancer, Alzheimer’s, a severe stroke. We’re all juggling raising our young children while looking after our parents and, you know, working full-time and trying to keep healthy and all that jazz.
I must confess: I feel somewhat cheated by adulthood. I sometimes feel as if this is not the deal I signed up for – is there a return policy somewhere I can look at, please?
The reality is that life is often hard, and frequently boring. The to-do list is never-ending, the drudge is real. There are very real demands on your time, energy and resources, and not enough help to go around.
The world is flaming out in a dozen different ways, and the news is constantly awful. And yet, this can’t be it, can it? It can’t just be duty and obligation and school runs and being a good child, interspersed with a few good meals and a holiday now and again? Surely not?
I have been accused, more than once in my life, of wearing rose-tinted glasses (to which I usually respond something along the lines of: would you like to borrow them?). When the glimmers craze swept through Instagram last year, I could see that these same accusers thought it was a frivolous rose-tinted craze, seeing as the emphasis is on finding tiny micro-moments of joy to focus on.
But what glimmers actually are is far deeper than that.
Read more: Discover the transformative power of daily glimmers by finding joy in life’s fleeting moments
You might know them by another name – not gratitude (never gratitude! I have a few bones to pick with gratitude, what with its often-sanctimonious edge that you “should be grateful” even when things are hard).
I knew glimmers as slices of joy: three-second moments that give you a pause in a busy day, that don’t fill you with excitement, but feel nice.
Just… nice.
A sip of water when you’re thirsty. Feeding crumbs to a bird while you sit outside munching your lunch. Work besties. The way the light filters through the leaves. There’s nothing spectacular here, and that’s purposeful: glimmers, or slices of joy, encourage you to adopt a low bar for delight.
It might seem foolish to focus on these little things – the joy of a full fridge, sliding your tongue across just-cleaned teeth, lush grass between your toes – but these glimmers have been shown to offer micro-regulation to your nervous system. These small moments of calm soften the nervous system and tell your body that it’s safe to relax. Combined together, they help to ease the constant pressure and anxiety you feel in a too-busy world filled with too many demands. Stacked on top of each other, glimmers offer some light in the darkness.
The term glimmers was coined by clinician Deb Dana. It’s often referred to as “the opposite of triggers” because triggers are a small moment that can cascade a stressful response in your body, and glimmers are a small moment that can cascade a peaceful response. But I prefer the emphasis on the nervous system and how joy activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
I first discovered the idea of slices of joy many years before I discovered glimmers.
The phrase comes from Chade Meng-Tan, Google’s former Happiness Guru (I mean, of course it does) and he speaks about how, once you start noticing these thin slices of joy, they appear everywhere. Instead of putting your life and happiness on hold until the Next Big Thing – a holiday, a promotion, a life partner, a house – this is a method to enjoy life as it is right now.
I had flirted with the concept of slices of joy for many years, but it really came into its own for me when my mom died. Thirteen days from diagnosis to death: a shock so complete that the grief knocked me sideways. In the face of grief, there was no space for happiness, excitement, delight, enthusiasm. That was all completely out of reach. But three seconds of nice? I could manage that.
I have since stress-tested the concept through my dad’s severe stroke, a loved one’s terminal cancer journey, home renovations and, perhaps most tellingly, the daily grind. It works. In fact, it might be the only thing that works.
Life is often hard, and frequently boring. But it is also filled with so much beauty, joy and wonder.
The way a drop of dew suspends in a flower, watching the seasons change, time with someone you love, finishing a puzzle, a book so good you hope it’ll never end, noticing clouds, laughing so hard you can’t catch your breath, a really excellent meme, a superb episode of TV, that first sip of tea or coffee for the day, a hug from someone you love.
What a world we live in. Aren’t we the lucky ones? DM
Bridget McNulty is the author of Daily Glimmers and The Grief Handbook. She is also co-founder of Sweet Life Diabetes Community, South Africa’s largest online diabetes community.