What’s in it for me? Learn to find joy through life’s crazy.
What’s the difference between happiness and joy? For Mary Katherine Backstrom, or MK as she’s become known, the answer can be found in the garden.
Growing up in Alabama in the 1980s, MK always came home from school with a huge bouquet of purple flowers that she’d picked. Her mom would take them and exclaim, “How beautiful!”
But one day, MK arrived home empty-handed. Her mom asked why there were no flowers that day. Little MK was discouraged. She’d discovered that her favorite flowers weren’t flowers at all. They were weeds! Something with a dreadful name, too: henbit.
Now, MK’s mother was an avid gardener. She cultivated bounties of crawling roses and lush irises – the really hard stuff to grow. She bent down and explained to MK that flowers are finicky. They require the perfect conditions to thrive. But weeds are resilient and can survive anywhere.
Life often presents us with less-than-ideal conditions. It’s filled with ups and downs. And joy is kind of like henbit. It grows wherever it can, poking up through life’s cracks. Happiness, on the other hand, is rather precious, like a rose. Beautiful, but finicky.
In this Blink to Mary Kathrine Backstrom’s Crazy Joy, we’ll learn how to cultivate the wild weediness of joy in our lives guided all the while by MK. She may not be a scientist or a trained therapist, but she has gathered a lot of life experience.
We’ll draw on her humor and stories, as well as some popular culture and even philosophy, as we pick up joy and explore it from every angle. What will emerge is a new understanding.
May the joy be with you!
We tend to believe that we can only be happy when everything in our lives is perfect. When I finally land my dream job… If only I could afford my dream wedding… As soon as I shed that extra holiday weight… But the reality is, the quest for perfection only gets in the way.
We often try to cozy up beside things that we wrongly equate with joy. Things like social status, wealth, achievement, and beauty. But as soon as they’re in our grasp, we just start chasing the next thing. This type of happiness is fleeting.
On the other hand, anything that looks like the opposite of joy sends us running for the hills. Heartbreak, disappointment, failure? There’s no way these things will bring us joy! Best to be avoided at all costs.
The problem with this approach is that avoiding pain or discomfort so often leads to avoiding life. It’s the risks you take that lead you to joy. Sure, you might fall off the horse. But if you don’t at least try, you’ll never experience the thrill of galloping along the beach with the wind in your hair.
So what can you do? Where can you find joy? For MK, the key is to stop looking at the destination. Instead, joy is found in the journey. And the journey of life is filled with ups and downs. There’s no way to avoid that. In fact, heartbreak and failure are often signs of a life lived to the fullest.
In the next few sections, we’re going to explore some of life’s hardships that often feel like the furthest thing from joy – things like fear, insecurity, loneliness, and the ultimate killjoy itself, death. But if you learn to change your mindset, you can begin to find joy in even the darkest moments.
To do this, let’s turn briefly to Sir Issac Newton. That’s right, put your nerd glasses on because we’re about to get sciency. Newton’s third law of motion tells us that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
You can think of joy as a force. And as with all forces, it shows up in pairs. If you want to experience joy, you better be prepared for the counterforces that will inevitably pull on you: disappointment, heartbreak, failure, and sadness. They’re all part of life. But then again, so is joy.
The Thief of Comparison
Anyone close to MK knows that she’s not a baker. As much as she wants to have her own mother’s talent for whipping up towering cakes and gooey pastries, MK has come to accept her limitations in this department.
So what on earth compelled her to show up to her mother-in-law’s Thanksgiving dinner one year holding two store-bought pecan pies, insisting that she’d baked them herself? The answer is something that most of us, and especially mothers, know all too well: comparison. MK felt deficient for not being able to make her own pies like many of the other women in her life.
Comparison seems so harmless and innocent at first glance. But here’s what you need to know: it’s secretly running amok in your psyche, stealing as much joy as it can get its grubby hands on. One study from the National Institutes of Health found that an average of 12 percent of all our thoughts are comparisons. That’s a lot of brain space devoted to making yourself feel insufficient.
Working with her therapist, MK realized just how often she compares herself to friends and family, and even complete strangers. And these comparisons are usually accompanied by negative thoughts directed at herself. For instance, it’s not just that the woman comforting her child on the bus is a better mother, but also that MK must be a terrible mother.
You can think of your sense of self as a household. There are several roommates inside with different needs and priorities. MK’s mental self was constantly being a bully to the other residents, especially her emotional self. Her therapist asked why she can be so kind and considerate to everyone else, but not to herself?
The solution is simple on paper, but not so easy in practice. You have to accept yourself for who you are. Remember that, among the eight billion people on this planet, there’s only one you. Don’t deprive the world of the chance to get to know the real version.
So, MK decided to put her therapist’s advice into practice. She was going to make a new friend that day, and the name of that friend? MK. Why don’t you give it a go, too? What might it feel like to treat all the housemates living in your house of self like you would treat a good friend?
Death – The Ultimate Killjoy
One day, MK was writing at her favorite coffee shop when she struck up a conversation with a stranger. She told him about her research on joy and he recommended a philosopher to check out: Friedrich Nietzsche.
MK was skeptical. Wasn’t he the one who wrote about nihilism? That sounded like the opposite of joy. But she headed to the library and picked up a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And she was surprised to find a lot of wisdom about joy in that dusty old book.
You see, when Zarathustra and his followers first came to realize that life was meaningless, they became depressed. But once they accepted that pain is part of life, they passionately believed that it was worth living, because we can still experience joy. They sang, “joys all want eternity,” meaning that when we experience it, we wish joy could last forever.
Fear over our own mortality is one of the most human of things. It’s hard to look death in the face. But like our explorations with fear, you don’t want a lifetime of playing it safe to hold you back from experiencing the deep, eternal joys that living can bring.
As strange as it may sound, it was a daytime game show from the 1980s that helped MK wrestle with this conundrum. Remember Supermarket Sweep? It was basically a grocery trivia game. But the real magic came in the last segment.
Here, contestants were given limited time to run through the supermarket aisles, filling their grocery carts with items. The winner was the person with the highest total value in their cart at the buzzer. MK always got frustrated with the show, yelling at contestants, “Don’t pick that! What are you thinking?”
But it also serves as a pretty good life lesson. So often we spend our limited time on earth loading up on canned beans instead of the filet mignon of life. Our mortality helps us focus our precious time on the things we value most.
One way to find joy is by accepting mortality. Don’t live as though you are dying – the fact is that we all are. Knowledge of your own mortality helps to loosen its hold, allowing you to move on and get back to the good stuff of living.
Riding Waves Among the Sharks
MK’s husband, Ian, is a surfer. So she wasn’t surprised to come home one night to find him pressing play on Chasing Mavericks. It’s the ultimate surfer flick, based on the life of American surfer Jay Moriarity. He trained for months to surf the infamous Mavericks break off the coast of California, considered to be one of the biggest waves in the world.
But Jay’s training mostly involved holding his breath. Why? Because the trickiest part of the Mavericks break is basically a white wall of chaos. If a surfer gets caught there, it’s like being tossed around in the wash cycle. Holding your breath for a long time is key to surviving it.
And of course, this is exactly wha t happened to Jay. The three minutes in real life that he was trapped in the white wall feels more like ten in the Hollywood version. Thankfully, Jay makes it out alive, smiling no less. He even grabs his backup board and paddles out again!
The metaphor is hopefully clear: joy is like riding a wave. But it’s often found in treacherous territory. Even if you’re not surfing life’s equivalent of the Mavericks, there are always risks involved, always rocks to avoid. And fear is one of the biggest barriers to taking those risks.
Most surfers have an unusual need to conquer their fears. MK experienced this at the beach one time with Ian, who always spends his day out in the water, catching the waves. So, when he came in for a rest, MK was suspicious. She immediately knew there was a shark in the water.
Ian smiled sheepishly, “Six-foot hammerhead.” But it wasn’t long before he was back out in the shark-infested waters. At first, MK thought he was crazy. But surfing brings Ian immense joy. And joy is crazy sometimes. That’s what makes it so exhilarating.
Final summary
So often we believe that happiness will only come when our life is perfect, when everything is exactly how we dreamed it would be, when we’re free of hardship, land the perfect job, get fit, or when our baking skills win prizes. But that’s just not reality. Finding true joy is about embracing the crazy of life, in all its ups and downs.
So, accept your mortality, celebrate your uniqueness, and stop trying to meet impossible standards. When you decide to surf among the sharks, the waves of joy will come, and sometimes you’ll even catch one. Other times, you’ll have an epic tumble. But don’t worry, it’s totally worth it. Welcome to crazy joy.