Some people spend their lives chasing legacy, money, or the perfect highlight reel. I thought I wanted some of that too (and yes, a backyard lazy river still sounds amazing). But the older I get, the more convinced I am that the greatest prize in life isn’t what you build, it’s the joy you carry while you’re building it.
When you’re five, seven, or ten no one ever asks, “what do you want to FEEL when you grow up?” We get asked what we want to be — firefighter, astronaut, president — but nobody says, “I just want to be happy, I want to be loved.”
I was a pretty good kid-ball player, the kind who made the coach nod and the other parents whisper. By the time I hit my teens I realized I wasn’t about to be the second coming of Ken Griffey Jr.; my ten‑year‑old self had dreamed of hitting towering homers at Wrigley from my front yard, but the older me never paused long to list the obstacles — I just kept loving the game. I also pictured myself floating over Earth in a spaceship, then finishing my day by walking into a resolute desk on Pennsylvania Avenue like it was the next logical stop. Neither of those lives panned out either, and that’s fine — the point wasn’t the trophy or the title, it was the way playing and dreaming felt while I was doing it. And when asked as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up, those seemed like the things to do.
At the core, those dreams weren’t really about titles or résumés. They were about things my kid-brain was convinced would feel amazing to do. Who wouldn’t want to crush baseballs in front of a roaring crowd, float above the earth with the best view in the solar system, and then come home to make big decisions in the situation room that made you feel important?
Underneath all of that was a simple craving: I wanted a life that felt good. I wanted joy, even if I didn’t have that word for it yet.
In freshman of high school year I took a ‘Career Planning’ class where we did that personality quiz — you know, the one that supposedly maps your hobbies to a job title. Mine came back: Film Critic. I remember thinking, ‘Huh. I like movies, I like saying what I think — okay, fair.’ It felt less like destiny and more like another way my younger self was naming what brought me pleasure.
The funny part is, I didn’t even clock the real clue in that class. The essays and little reflection papers they made us write? Those lit me up in a way I didn’t have language for back then. I just knew I liked stringing words together, telling a story, and seeing a teacher write ‘good job’ in the margin.
Then in May 27th, 1999 I met someone who would change my life. When my daughter Emma was born, the whole ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ question quietly rewrote itself. I wasn’t chasing job titles anymore; I was standing in a hospital room realizing that being ‘Dad’ was its own universe of joy. Soon I’d discover late-night feedings, tiny fingers wrapped around mine, and figuring out how to be a family — it hit me that this was the kind of life my younger self had been reaching for without knowing its name.
A couple years later Abby joined the world, and the volume knob on joy cranked even higher. Suddenly it wasn’t just ‘I’m a dad,’ it was Emma-and-Abby, sisters giggling in the back seat, bedtime stories with one on each side, this little tribe that turned our apartment into something holy. Whatever career plans I’d imagined, none of them touched the quiet, everyday joy of being their dad.
And then I met Traci. She already had Kelli and Nikki, and suddenly my little family—Emma and Abby—became part of something bigger and softer. Loving those girls turned joy into a chorus: shared jokes at the dinner table, the way mornings felt when everyone was home, and the steady ache of wanting to protect that rhythm. It made everything else feel secondary.
I used to think joy was about stacking up good moments — baseball games, dream jobs, weddings, babies. Then sorrow moved in and refused to leave, and I learned something I wish I could’ve skipped the hard way: joy isn’t the opposite of sorrow. It’s what you stubbornly keep reaching for in the middle of it. The dark didn’t make joy more ‘legit,’ it just made me realize how deep and necessary it had always been.
Once upon a a time I believed that joy and sorrow were opposite ends of a line. You chase joy, you avoid sorrow, and if sorrow shows up it means you did something wrong or God forgot to ‘hedge’ your life properly. Then cancer moved into our story. Then hospital wristbands became part of the wardrobe, and I learned that joy doesn’t pack its bags when sorrow walks in.
Joy started looking less like mountaintop moments and more like Traci’s hand finding mine in an ICU bed, or a full night of sleep after weeks of alarms, or a dumb dad joke that made a tired nurse snort-laugh at 2 a.m. The sorrow didn’t make joy more “real,” it just stripped away the illusion that joy was fragile. It turns out the most stubborn joy shows up in the middle of the worst rooms, sits down next to you, and says, ‘Okay, we’re still here. What can we be grateful for in *this* mess?’”
Because here’s the thing: we have *seen* joy. We did DisneyWorld with the whole crew in Orlando (and alone just Traci and I later too). But herding kids through the parks and collapsing into hotel beds with sore feet and full hearts was peak joy. We flew across the country for Cheryl’s wedding in Pennsylvania and filled a dance floor with our little blended circus. Traci and I snuck away to a number of trips like Punta Cana or Cancun and we remembered what it felt like to just be husband and wife on a beach, not Mom and Dad and calendar managers. I got to stand there at Kelli’s college graduation party in a theater we rented for her special celebration during the COVID shutdown and later see her become the first of of our kids to walk the collegiate stage, and then take her to Hawaii to celebrate. And a few years later celebrate Nikki at Angels stadium as she donned the Cao and gown, and then we celebrated with a trip to Puerto Vallarta. These weren’t just vacations, they were full-body reminders that joy is a thing you can do on purpose.
Right now, pursuing joy for me doesn’t look like a powerful job, or a big bucket-list of trips or perfect seasons. It looks like stubbornly hunting for the sweetness that’s tucked inside a day that, on paper, looks awful. It’s the way Traci still reaches out and rubs my leg or squeezes my hand when she’s half-asleep. It’s someone like a nurse laughing at one of my terrible dad jokes at some unreasonable hour in a room that smells like antiseptic and fear. It’s Abby sending a wedding photo where Traci’s chair is front and center, and I can see the exact smile I fell in love with before cancer tried to steal it.
Pursuing joy looks like choosing to notice the soft blanket at the end of another long hospital day, the text from a kid checking in, the five quiet minutes on the couch where nobody needs anything from me. It looks like today, a quiet day on the couch where Traci is a little more like herself again, the steroids buying us some space to breathe and giving us this fragile, surprising hope. It looks like watching the pain back down just enough that we can imagine a new, tolerable normal taking shape. If life really is about the pursuit of joy, then this is what it means for me right now: not running away from the hard, but walking straight through it with my eyes peeled for every scrap of sweetness tucked into the mess.
It’s funny what happens when you grow up and the perspective you gain as you age. When I was a kid, I thought the point was to become something big. Baseball star, astronaut, President – pick your fantasy, chase it hard, and joy would be waiting for you at the finish line with a trophy. Somewhere along the way, I became the family guy instead, the dad in the stands and the husband in the hospital room, and it turns out that was where the real joy was hiding the whole time.
I can replay DisneyWorld and beach trips, and graduations or vacation flights in my head, but the truth is those days are now long gone. They did their job; they left their mark. I’m not going to waste the only life I actually have – this one – wishing I could time-travel back into old scenes or fast-forward into better ones. Joy doesn’t live in the reruns or the trailers. Joy lives in this moment, the one in front of me, on this couch, with this woman I love breathing a little easier today. I can’t touch yesterday and I can’t control tomorrow. I can hope for creating new memories down the road but I also don’t want to get too far ahead. Instead, I can be stubbornly, fiercely joyful right now. And if life really is about the pursuit of joy, then that’s the pursuit I’m giving myself to: not someday, not back then, but this exact day I’ve been handed.
Paul Ellis 
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