Perhaps you have heard the news as well. Across the U.K. a survey with youth ages 6-14 revealed “peace” to be the 2025 Oxford Children’s Word of the Year. The runner up was “AI,” Third place went to “resilience.” All three choices fitting for our global current events. There is a melancholy note of hope to the theme of the trio that says volumes about the world we have endowed to our children. And I find myself hoping that someday the frontrunners voted by our youth will be “joy” and “wonder.” If I am being an idealist, “joy” would take first place, and “wonder” second. Perhaps “peace” would round out third, but I haven’t quite decided upon that yet. For now, I’m choosing to focus on joy and wonder.

Interestingly, one of the newsfeeds through which I heard about the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year for 2025 was 1440. At the end of their current events, they always include a quote. Today’s quote is about joy and happiness, taken from the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger. It states: “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.”

I disagree. And rather than discuss the writer attributed to this quote, or his work, I’d like to talk about joy and wonder. Well, for. sake of argument, let’s include happiness too. In fact, let’s start with it. What do you think? Is happiness, in fact, a solid form? If I were the editor and had found this statement in a work of nonfiction, my scientific and metaphysical mind would beg to disagree. I would suggest the writer forgo the term “solid,” when referring to “happiness,” and use the liquid metaphor instead. As for joy, I would endow it with light. I would endow joy with the properties of a photon, and add to it “wonder” as the “solid” through which it travels and emanates.

I am the idealist that Salinger appeared to eschew as Holden took center stage and Phoebe was resigned to the margins, but never mind that. I said I wasn’t going to make this about the author or his work. On the other hand, one cannot overlook the relevance to our present time. Here we are now, today, with our youth calling out for us to find peace in this increasingly AI generated and conflict riddled world that affects our children’s internal and external state of being. And, here they are, fortified by their own youthful resilience pleading with us, more than implicitly, to find a balanced and sustainable way of existence.

This is where joy and wonder come into play as sustaining forces. For despite their dearth in our social projections, they are a constant, albeit arguably dormant state of being and driving force inside of us. When we allow ourselves to open to them, wonder becomes the vehicle through which joy rides throughout our being. It opens our cells to the spark of light that ignites us, reconnecting us to our origin story that extends and expands us beyond the confines of the corporeal, and weaves our essence into the unity of connection. When joy is ignited within us, peace becomes a constant, and resilience slips aside for there is no need for its hold. When wonder takes the reins, joy rides us into the knowing that we are, in fact, photons that seek only to dance the spectrum of light as a continuous, unbroken wave. A wave that knows no division or ending.