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This post is a review of The Joy You Make: Find The Silver Linings – Even On Your Darkest Days. By Steven Petrow. The Open Field. 304 pp. $29.
Because Western cultures tend to assume that joy is usually caused by external stimuli, Danielle Casioppo, a staff member at Yale University’s Being Well program, points out that most of us get little or no help learning “how to cultivate joy from within, on our own.”
Steven Petrow, a journalist and author among other books, of Dancing Against The Darkness, agrees. In The Joy You Make, Petrow draws on recent research in psychology and his own experiences as a gay man, prone to depression, who has survived testicular cancer and is still mourning for his sister, who died after a five-year struggle with ovarian cancer, identifies strategies to seek joy “in the everyday world, on good days as well as bad ones.”
Petrow offers dozens of practical recommendations. Several of them – calling people by their first name; sending hand-written thank you notes and holiday messages; practicing mindfulness while washing dishes; accepting imperfections, uncertainty, and aging – seem more likely to stimulate self-awareness or contentment than joy. Nor does Petrow offer a persuasive analysis of the differences between happiness and joy.
That said, The Joy You Make is a rare “how-to” book that can have a positive impact on readers’ lives.
With E.M. Forster’s “only connect” and Emile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” as his mantras, Petrow emphasizes that joy tends to occur most often when individuals “come together for a shared purpose.” Over the last half-century, however, as Robert Putnam demonstrated in Bowling Alone, participation in clubs, civic associations, political organizations, PTAs, sports leagues, and churches declined precipitously. To rekindle kinship with others, Petrow, an inveterate list maker, suggests that his readers write down the “communities” to which they feel connected, those they’d be interested in joining, and take affirmative action. Volunteer work, including taking out an elderly neighbor’s trash, bringing a meal to a sick or recently bereaved friend, or helping teenagers with their homework, he indicates, generates a “helper’s high.”
Petrow also suggests jotting down how each good deed felt, recording in a journal the things and individuals to whom you are grateful, or giving thanks in person. Researchers agree that expressing gratitude reduces blood pressure, bolsters immune systems, enhances psychological well-being, resilience, and the relationships themselves.
And Petrow recommends playing games, “whether it’s Qwirkle or tennis,” board or card games, at someone’s home, on a neighborhood court, or at a summer retreat for adults. Players should set aside their competitive instincts and enjoy honing their skills, while spending time with friends and family. George Bernard Shaw, Petrow suggests, had it about right: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow because we stop playing.”
Recalling positive memories of people, places, and activities at a specific time, otherwise known as “reminiscence therapy,” Petrow writes, helped him realize “I don’t have to be grasping to find joy in the external world – it actually inhabits me.”
Reading to his mother when she was ill, Petrow reveals, was one of the most beautiful memories he has of her last year. He and his former partner often read to each other in bed, before falling asleep in each other’s arms. Discussing what you’ve read, informally or in a book club, is yet another way to connect.
The Joy You Make ends with Petrow’s account of the death of his sister. Four days before her 61st birthday, Julie learned she no longer had any viable treatment options. A moment or two later, she sang Carol Burnett’s television theme song, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” and tugged her earlobe as if to say goodbye, as Burnett did at the end of each show. Julie got what became a going away party, “a gift to us, a way to celebrate the day, to celebrate her life.”
Petrow wonders, “We simultaneously hold such diametrically opposed emotions” as joy and sorrow, celebration and grief. One answer, he tells us, comes from Angela Williams Gorrell. Joy “has grit, it isn’t fluffy or ephemeral,” Gorrell wrote in The Gravity of Joy: “Joy is what we feel in our bones when we feel connected to what is good, beautiful, meaningful.”
Never bored or idle, always grateful, Julie, Steven remembers, “sucked the marrow out of life.” “That,” he believes, “was the joy of Julie.” A joy that lives on in him.
