A book about happiness that's also about grief, joyful flourishing in the face of injustice, & not being a machine.
An interview with Joy Clarkson, author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist's Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life
You might know this famous tweet, “You are not a machine. you are more like a garden. you need different things on different days. a little sun today, a little less water tomorrow. you have fallow and fruitful seasons. it is not a design flaw. it is wiser than perpetual sameness. what does your garden need today?”… but do you know its author?
Well, I am just SO PLEASED to share this interview with Joy Marie Clarkson with you!
We are chatting about her book Aggressively Happy: A realist’s guide to believing in the goodness of life. It’s a book about “being joyful though you have considered all the facts” (to quote Wendell Berry). You’ll see from this interview the kind of depth and nuance of thought combined with just, like, Good Sense that one gets when reading Joy’s writing. It’s the sort of book you can sip at chapter by chapter and the experience of reading it is delightful but also it’s a really practical book. I guess I could sum it up by saying it’s wisdom literature in all the best ways.
I hope you enjoy it! (And if you do, please pass your thanks to Joy by getting her book or subscribing to her substack, which is a treat).
On happiness & sadness being sisters, and joy being more fundamental than loss
Steph: You called your book "Aggressively Happy: A realist's guide to believing in the goodness of life." I think something the book does very well is hold those two things--realism AND goodness-- closely together. Christians are sometimes correctly chided for toxic positivity and minimizing or over-spiritualizing pain and suffering. That's not what you're doing here. How do you see believing in the goodness of life as fundamental to joy even when the world is broken?
Joy: That is a great question and one that I wrestle with in the book. I do think that Christians (and people in general) want to rush past real suffering and tell people to look on the bright side. To be honest, I think we often do this because suffering is uncomfortable, and people don’t like to be uncomfortable. Other people’s sorrow frightens us because it reminds us of our vulnerability and closeness, at any moment, to loss and disappointment. Because of this, in writing a book about happiness, I found that one of the main things I was writing about was, actually, sadness, disappointment. A reader sent me a very kind email thanking me for writing a book about grief. I laughed, but I think it is ultimately true.
And I think that is true because happiness and sadness are, as I write in my book, sisters. Our anger, our grief about really broken things in the world testifies to the fact that we have in our mind a way that life should or at least could be. There is a joy and vitality that we judge as appropriate to life, and feel aggrieved when it is stolen away. But our grief and anger wouldn’t make sense if we didn’t have some intuition of a fullness for which we are meant. If loss and difficulty are fundamental, then why do we always feel indignant? That’s just the way things are! In that sense, I think joy, delight, wholeness are more fundamental than loss. That’s what I mean by sadness and happiness being sisters: they both testify that things matter and that life is a gift. One rejoices in the presence of that gift, and the other weeps when it has been taken away. And it is just and right to weep when a valuable thing is lost!
But to imagine that there aren’t real states of flourishing? That the “joyful” life is not humankind’s birthright? If that were the case, what motivation would we have for fighting for justice?
I like how GK Chesterton puts it: “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”
On not being a machine, and self-care in challenging times (also known as - ways to survive lockdown and/or young motherhood).
Steph: I'm interested that you structured this book as a list of practices, or perspectives, really, that help ground us in the goodness of life. You wrote part of this during the Covid lockdowns. Sounds like UK lockdown was pretty strict-- ours in South Africa was, too! Luckily our weather is amazing, so even though I was locked down with my two toddlers and husband in a tinyhouse on wheels, we had the great outdoors constantly! Did you find yourself leaning particularly hard on any of these perspectives or practices in that season? Many of my readers are mothers-- in the midst of this physically demanding and emotionally draining, yet also extremely mundane and not very visible job... not very different from parts of lockdown-- what chapter would you love to hand to them to hold onto in this season?
Joy: Oh, gosh! I will not lie: the lockdowns in the UK were fairly terrible. They were particularly grim for me as I was trying to finish my PhD during the lockdown, which is a purgatorial experience no matter the context! One of the things I tried to be careful with in the book was that I didn’t want it to be airy-fairy, impractical advice that made people feel more burdened and guilty than they already do, and I think writing it in the midst of a time in my own life that particularly demanding helped me not be too rose-lensed. I think if I were to recommend one chapter in the midst of a mundane and demanding season, it would be “Remember You Have a Body” and perhaps “Accept Love.” Both of these are, in their own way, about accepting and living according to our limitations. I think we make life much more difficult for ourselves when we try to be superheroes, and we become more resilient when we remember we’re sheep, little creatures who need care and attention and rest. I think we’re tempted to think of self-care as selfish, but actually, it’s just (here’s that word again) realism. You are not a Machine. You are a fleshy human being who gets blood sugar lows and period cramps and pretending otherwise doesn’t help.
One thing that has helped me is to think of self-care as an addition rather than a subtraction, to think of nourishment rather than restriction. I’m actually in a pretty demanding season right now, and what has helped me is to add things to my life that nourish me. In food, this means not trying to be strict in my diet to only eat healthy unpleasant things, but rather to add things that I know will make me feel healthier and better. In every day practice that means not trying to be more disciplined about my daily devotions and readings, but to add something to my every day life that I know will nourish my soul: like the Pray as you Go podcast, or beautiful hymns while I cook. It’s a silly thing, but it works for me. By focusing on adding life-giving things to my life I find I am able to hack my own anxiety about self-care.
(👆🏻 The above post from Joy’s instagram has a mini-dive into this idea of remembering you have a body. Also, a great quote from Augustine on taking a bath. )
On authors who help us think through beauty and joy in the face of injustice, and a framework for evaluating our choices…
Steph: You’re a contributing editor at Plough magazine, which readers of this newsletter will know I link to excessively. I'm interested in the work that Plough puts out, because they are one of the few spaces I have found where both beauty and justice are constantly held forward together. I think maybe it was chapter four in your book, "Enjoy things unironically" where you talk about barriers to our ability to really enjoy the wonderful and the ordinary things of life. Why do we talk about "guilty pleasures" instead of celebrating them? Some of the barriers to enjoyment that you mention are fear of what other people will think of us, and guilt (who am I to enjoy something when there is an earthquake in Turkey?) Something which you tangentially mention, but I'd love you to unpack a little more, is this idea of injustice. Specifically, are there any writers, or artists, or stories that you lean on that help you process enjoyment of life in the face of not just random suffering, but injustice? How is enjoying life important, even (or perhaps especially), when there is injustice around? How do you properly enjoy, and not give in to escapism, or excessive frivolity that is unhealthy?
Joy: I don’t think I have an answer to this entirely— how can any of us, really? It’s something I think about a lot and want to keep growing in and being open to changing. As to authors who help me think about injustice and living justly in the world in the many dimensions that one could imagine, I have a motley (and sometimes contradictory crew). Lately I have been really enjoying the work of Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, James Baldwin, Esau McCaulley, Wendell Berry, and the Prophets! In a humorous way, I found the NBC comedy series the Good Place very good at placing the problem you describe. In the later seasons they’re trying to figure out why the entire world seems to be going to the “bad place” (hell, in the series) and it comes to the conclusion that the modern, globalised, capitalist world is so enmeshed and endured various forms of exploitation, that it’s impossible to be innocent. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I think we can make efforts to make more conscious and generous choices in our life, but often even those are the result of privilege.
These are questions I try to think about when these questions arise:
1. By doing this, am I keeping someone else from flourishing?
2. Would this cause others to flourish, or in my flourishing would the flourishing of others be enabled?
3. Realistically, what else will I use these resources for? By denying myself painting my own living room, will I actually give that money, time, or resources to other people in a meaningful way? Or am I just denying myself so that I feel more righteous without actually doing anything to help people?
As Christian-ese as it sounds, I think it’s important that we pray about these things. I think it’s important to not try to do things to make ourselves but feel less guilty, but to do things that actually help people. In this way, working with the Bruderhof (who run the Plough) has really inspired me. They live a life of modesty and devotion and justice that I really admire. They are “all in” in an almost monastic way with their possessions, time, and convictions. And yet one thing I have noticed is they are very generous and celebrate small joys very fully! I have been on the receiving end of that many times— a bouquet for a birthday, a generous gift for special occasions. I think the addition not subtraction theory is operative and helpful here: not to avoid contamination, but to actively seek ways to be more generous, more in solidarity, and more a part of standing on the side of the overlooked and unjustly treated.
On Joy’s next book, and how the metaphors we adopt shape our lives…
Steph: Tell me about your next book!
Joy: This book is, in essence, a meditation on seven metaphors we commonly use in every day life. Now, I now that the word “metaphor” doesn’t get most people’s hearts pumping. But I hope to show readers in a compelling and enjoyable way how the metaphors that we live with shape how we think about our world, our life, and our prayer. Part of this is a task of excavation, making people aware of the metaphors they use about themselves and the world. For instance, we sometimes describe our selves as computers: we need to “recharge” or “recalibrate,” we take a long time to “process things,” we “update” each other. We don’t consciously think to ourselves “I am using the metaphor of a computer to describe my mind” but that is what we’re doing, and drawing that connection makes us assume several things about ourselves. If we don’t behave like a computer, and that’s our operative metaphor, we begin to think there’s something wrong with us. This is a a concept I’ve been toying with in my work for a long time (for instance, consider this conversation with Kristyn Emmer).
You are (not) a Tree
Wisdom is (not) a light
Safety is (not) a tower
Love is (not) a disease
Change is (not) birth
Sadness is (not) a burden
Life is (not) a Journey
Those are the metaphors I explore, and I’ll leave it there in hopes people will be intrigued enough to buy the book :)
How to keep up with Joy’s writing
Buy the book Aggressively Happy - (this link lets you choose to buy on amazon or elsewhere) also… there’s a playlist, links to artworks to contemplate on each theme in the book… this book is a feast.
Subscribe to her substack. (For those of you who love it when I share links… Joy’s “commonplace” book newsletters are a treasure trove of quotes and goodness. She also has a podcast about literature called Speaking with Joy. The latest one on George Eliot and the book The Marriage Question with author and philosopher Clare Carlisle… yes. Just yes).
She is on twitter here, instagram here.
(Our waxed autumn leaf *red* décor for Pentecost. Also cue: all the aloes blooming, blue skies, and almost snow on the Drakensberg mountains. It’s Autumn in full force!)
A few just beautiful links
This interesting take on “Should churches be beautiful?” from Plough magazine by Sharon Rose Christner. The author was raised in blank box churches with folding chairs, and wrestles with the excessiveness of cathedrals. (I feel this. I literally asked this question once to a speaker at a church camp who was talking about beauty. This article is more satisfying and interesting than his answer).
I finished reading, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” by poet Maggie Smith. I’m not sure a memoir about a mid-life divorce could be called happy, but it is beautifully written and said many true things about grief, loss, partnership, change, and identity. For anyone interested in my mother-writer obsession, she has a great portion about being a writer in early motherhood. I’m so glad more people are trying to give pictures and words to this tension. She ends that section talking about feeling guilty that she wanted to be known as a poet and not only a mother (although she loved motherhood): “Is it ever enough if our inner lives, and our lives aside from being parents , are just that- -inner lives, lives aside? Hidden pictures? I wonder: How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life— a life with them and a life in words, too? I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions. Fathers don’t feel feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home.” (BOOM- that last sentence there,🔥 underline please).
🎵🎹 Here is our Pentecost playlist for some Holy Spirit & South African vibes.
📖 I also finished Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms by Justin Whitmel Earley (4/5 for a parenting book, really good!) and Why Smart Kids Worry: And What Parents Can Do to Help (15 Tools for Parenting Your Anxious Child) by Allison Edwards (actually VERY practical! I screenshotted way too many pages to forward to friends).
Until next month, friends!
— Steph