Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler

This book was recommended to me by someone who has faced life threatening illness herself, with the feeling that this approach was helpful to her as she faces an uncertain future. The author is a long term survivor of Stage 4 Colon cancer, which is generally considered to be an unsurvivable disease, with the aid of immunotherapy. The reason this might indeed resonate with me is that I, too, am a long term survivor of an illness that is also considered unsurvivable. This is about finding joy, regardless of the circumstances. She has been a long time critic of the culture of bashing the American cult of positivity and the pursuit of optimal happiness. So this is difference from that. She talks a lot about the difference between happiness and joy--they have a distinct psychological profile. Here is it in her own words: "Happiness will feel like ease, it will feel relaxing, it will feel like the accumulated good things, where you’re kind of climbing a ladder of good feelings, and you get to have a beautiful view, and that’s because even just the word happiness comes from the word "hap." It’s the Norse word for chance, which just means like happenstance, the stuff that happens to you. We experience happiness that way — it’s the temperature of our coffee and the music playing and the friend you get to call later and the job that came through. It’s very contextual and circumstantial, and it’s also very incremental. It takes a lot of things coming together to make us happy. Joy, on the other hand, is not relaxing. Joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling. It’s like it startles us awake. It will make us say, "Yes, yes, it is good to be alive." And that’s why I think, whereas happiness is just a lot of positive things happening to you, joy isn’t just a positive emotion. It’s a story. That’s why it touches existential themes, like, "Is it good to be alive?" Joy, when it bubbles up inside of us, presents itself as an answer to that question." This is well worth the time to read and think about.