Joyful, Everywhere

A very grateful woman with a half-unpacked suitcase makes the case for who we are, and what we should do this summer 🙂

Hello lovies,

I’m back at my desk for the first time in almost two months. I traveled to three countries, 18 cities, and saw more than 7,000 of your gorgeous faces. (Have I mentioned yet that you are the very best that God’s great earth has to offer? You are. You really are.)

I was in Kentucky right before the tour kicked off, and someone asked me what it was like “out there.” I think she meant: out there in the wider world, somewhere beyond her own algorithm. And I said, “Frankly, it’s pretty heartening.”

You would think, given the news, that the world is brimming with malcontents thrilled by propaganda and gerrymandering and missile strikes. “Give us more contempt for our neighbor!” they’d say. “Give us a tenuous sense of our future and make us buy something!”

But if you want to believe in something wonderful today, believe in yourselves. This is a spectacular community. And given what I learned about you on this trip, I thought I might name some of the truths I learned about us, and then ask you where we want to go together as we head into summer.

(Look, if you’re in Canada, I’m sorry I’m saying the word “summer.” You haven’t gotten a spring yet, and my parents just took their winter tires off the car and I HEAR YOU. Shorts are for “other people.” And if you’re in the UK, well done. You’ve actually had a pretty nice spring and I don’t believe you anymore when you say it rains. You live in a beige trenchcoat paradise.)

1. We are people who have seen the world from the outside looking in.

Again and again, people would tell me something difficult about their lives and then soften it with some version of, “But that’s probably just me...”

It isn’t. It is almost never just you.

Everywhere I went, the same kinds of stories surfaced. A diagnosis that refuses to become meaningful. A relationship that is harder than it looks from the outside. A persistent sense of falling short of a life one is supposed to be grateful for.

C.S. Lewis described friendship as the moment one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself...” That sentence trails off in the original, and I love that it does. Because what we usually mean is: I thought no one but myself felt this way. Carried this. Wondered this. And it turns out, a great many of us do.

We assume our struggles are private failures. More often than not, they are the shared human condition.

2. The ache is remarkably consistent.

In Joyful, Anyway, I call it “the ache” — that ongoing sense that something is missing or unresolved, even in a life where everything seems to be going really well. This holy longing we are all born with.

What struck me meeting you all is not just that the ache exists, but how predictable it is. It may look different in our lives, but it asks the same questions: Will I be okay? Will this ever feel like enough? Am I the only one who can’t seem to fix this?

Augustine wrote, sixteen hundred years ago, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Sixteen hundred years. And we have invented the printing press, the polio vaccine, and the standing desk in the meantime, and the ache remains exactly where he left it.

Which is to say: it is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. We tend to treat those questions like problems to solve. They appear, instead, to be part of the structure of being human.

3. People are beyond weary of being told how to fix themselves.

I didn’t hear a strong appetite for better strategies. Most people have already optimized, improved, and rinsed and repeated. There is no shortage of advice about how to feel better, and we have, by and large, read it.

What I heard instead was a quiet exhaustion with the premise. The idea that a life can be perfected if we just get the inputs right. That somewhere, in a podcast or a protocol or a particularly disciplined morning, the answer is waiting.

Mary Oliver, who knew a thing or two about being a person, wrote: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

I watched people exhale at that idea, even briefly. Which tells you something about how long they had been holding their breath.

4. Joy is not where we were told to look for it.

If joy depends on everything going well, then it will always be fragile. And mostly absent. And mostly someone else’s.

But that’s not what I saw.

I saw people laugh minutes after naming something painful. I felt rooms relieved to hear, out loud, that joy doesn’t require the absence of sorrow. It appears alongside it, without resolving it, and without asking permission.

Wendell Berry wrote, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” which I think is the only kind of joy worth having. The other kind — the kind that requires you to look away — isn’t really joy. It’s just a mood with good lighting.

Also, a wonderful person stopped me as I was crossing the street after an event and handed me these and said DRIVE-BY JOY.

And maybe we all could use a little drive-by joy in our lives.

5. We are pretty good at making friends with books.

I have always believed this, but being on the road made it luminous in a new way. To stand in a room with people who believe that words matter is a particular kind of privilege. Thank you.

Throughout this tour, I also met so many incredible indie booksellers who have built their livelihoods around the careful curation of stories. These are the people who press titles into your hands and say “trust me.” And we do. :)

On that note, would you like to do a summer fiction book together? I have something in mind that might be fun. It’s pretty new, it’s fiction, and it’s profound and wonderful, and it took me two seconds to realize that this author also went to divinity school, because she weaves spiritual themes into the most incredible story. But I don’t want to burden you guys if you have enough to read. What do you think?

6. Friends are the best kind of medicine.

So many of my most favorite people in the world came out to see me. You wore the merch. You cheered the loudest. You made green rooms so much more fun. I love you all forever.

But I also loved hearing stories of you all grabbing a friend or two and making a night (or trip!) out of coming to the Joyful, Anyway tour.

7. The point was never a single evening.

I feel so lucky that this work isn’t about producing a single experience. It’s about building a movement. One of honesty and of increasing capacity for joy. One of community and friends saying “me too.” My hope is this is just the beginning.

If you came to a stop on this tour, thank you.

If your work contributed to the success of this tour, THANK YOU.

If you sent a kind word from afar, thank you.

If you are reading this from your own kitchen table, in the middle of your own beautiful and complicated life, thank you.

The book is out in the world now, doing whatever books do once they leave us. And I am here, deeply tired and deeply grateful, which seems to be the only honest way to end anything.

I’d love to know: where are the ache and the gratitude sitting side by side in your life right now? And if you came to a tour stop, I’d love to know what you took home that day.

8. We want to feel guided toward more joy this summer.

Am I right about that?

Here is what I have been thinking. Right now is MAY-CEMBER — a version of the end of the year that signs parents up for an insane round-robin of recitals, graduations, end-of-year bake sales, and highly specific outfits that can only be purchased from a store across town. And right after MAY-CEMBER comes the summer you have not had ten consecutive minutes to imagine.

Summer always arrives with a kind of promise — a mind at rest, a slower morning, an evening that refuses to end. But most of us walk into it the same way we walk into every other season: with a list, a low hum of obligation, and the creeping suspicion that we should be doing more. By August, we are slightly horrified to discover that the entirety of “summer” could be replaced with the words I’m sorry, can we try that again please?

I don’t want that for us this year. And I don’t think you want it either. I want a summer too. I want to remember what one feels like.

So I was thinking: maybe we could have a JOYFUL ANYWHERE summer together. How does that sound?

I can’t do a daily reflection like we do for Lent or Advent, because I have a gorgeous kid about to be freed from the prison of middle school, and I promised him we would be very summer-y this summer and fix up some go-carts. (A promise I intend to keep, though I have only ever changed the oil on a Toyota Previa. Pray for me.)

But here is what I can do. Every week, I will write a reflection built around one very simple spiritual practice — something small enough to actually try, something lovely enough to actually matter. A way of paying attention. A way of slowing down. A way of locating the soul of summer in the middle of your actual human life.

Some of you will be traveling. Parenting. Grandparenting. Caretaking. Taking care of your own illness or issue. Or sitting in the exact same spot feeling a little lonely. We can make some space for it all.

And then, together, we can compare notes. What you noticed. What surprised you. What broke open a little. (This community’s comments to each other are my absolute favorite.)

I have been reading Sue Monk Kidd’s book on creativity, and she names the stuckness so many of us feel: “Usually, our minds are so busy and clogged with information there’s hardly time and space for the imagination to do its thing, and the thing it does is sublime.”

That is what I want to make room for. The sublime thing your imagination does when you finally let it.

Emerson promised us this is possible. “In times when we thought ourselves indolent,” he wrote, “we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”

Begun in us. I cannot stop thinking about that phrase.

So here is my question, and I really do want to know: do you want a minute to feel like something is begun in you? Do you want to spend a season noticing what is quietly being made in you while you are not looking?

If you do, let’s have a Joyful Anywhere Summer. I will meet you here, and wherever your summer takes you.