Canadian author Kate Bowler’s new book, Joyful, Anyway, details her search for a solution to the unresolved restlessness that remains after she survives a serious cancer diagnosis.Michaella Jelin/Supplied
Canadian author Kate Bowler has zero time for gratitude journals, good vibes and anybody who suggests that just because she almost died, she should be dancing with unicorns under rainbows every day.
Dr. Bowler, a religious historian at Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina, won’t tell you to rely on “thoughts and prayers” to solve real problems, or pitch yet another scientifically questionable, totally unattainable five-step happiness plan.
Anyone who rage-types “Is this it?” 258 times and then leaves those two pages in the published version of a book called Joyful, Anyway is not judging you for feeling crappy when the world is crap.
Her book, which came out last month, details Dr. Bowler’s search for a solution to the unresolved restlessness that remains after she survives a serious cancer diagnosis.
But it’s also a blunt and often funny challenge to the idea that human beings can ever banish grief and anxiety and find perfect happiness.
Half rant, half reconciliation, Dr. Bowler offers a timely rebuttal to those feel-good expectations, especially now, when society’s most lofty values are being eroded by reckless acts and vicious rhetoric.
But then, this obsession with the bright side, as Dr. Bowler writes, was never useful – reality always gets in the way. Few things kill happiness faster than toxic positivity, as plenty of research studies suggest. Life will not be perfect, no matter what the trillion-dollar wellness industry says, if we just meditate, drink detox tea and fill up that journal with thankfulness until the pen runs dry.
Those oft-touted wellness practices might help some people some of the time. But you can’t “gratitude your way into feeling differently about what you actually know to be true,” Dr. Bowler says in an interview, which is that the world is not in a good place right now.
But you can, as the Winnipeg native learned, find joy.
Happiness is a fragile state of being – “a sense of ease” Dr. Bowler calls it, which is also why it’s a constant pursuit. “One wrong thing, one wrong mood, the whole thing can fall over,” she says. Since you can’t be anxious or sad or frustrated, and truly happy at the same time, happiness is the destination we never reach.
Dr. Bowler suggests most North Americans exist in a culture of apocalyptic optimism. ‘We feel like survivors, even though we’re not yet sure what we must survive.’Michaella Jelin/Supplied
But joy exists with grief. It can be a companion to stress. It’s the awareness of something precious and meaningful, a quiet epiphany in the noise. “And that temporary wholeness is so precious,” Dr. Bowler says, “especially when you can’t organize your life into consistent, positive feelings.”
For instance, Dr. Bowler had recently experienced an unexpected rush of transcendent joy. She happened to peek into a room where her son, who was wearing a Second World War helmet, and her father, were in a serious historical discussion. And her heart, she says, exploded, recognizing a beautiful moment that wouldn’t last forever. “Knowing that, of course, fills you from the basement to the attic in one second.”
And in that second, the world makes sense. Which, for the most part it doesn’t. While bombs fall in Iran and people in sub-Saharan Africa can’t get life-saving drugs, she says, “I can still get Amazon same-day shipping for acne patches.” In that discordant reality, we become more anxious, more vigilant.
Most North Americans exist in a culture, of apocalyptic optimism, she suggests. “We feel like survivors, even though we’re not yet sure what we must survive.” And to solve the resulting anxiety, we’re given a firehose of optimization and progress narratives.”
Surviving cancer, that narrative also suggested, would give her abundant wisdom or perpetual thankfulness, cure her from being an ordinary person. It did not. Even with a baby and her dream job, she felt unfinished. Yet this ache made her feel guilty.
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Over the course of the book, she returns to ancient wisdom, pays attention when the topic of happiness comes up at gatherings, and seeks out advice. Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest, originally from Saskatchewan, and the author of the book The Holy Longing, tells her that the ache is “not a spiritual glitch,” it’s programming. Just as we are able to experience joy, we are designed to keep yearning for more.
“The language for the ache,” she says, “is the language for being human, for wanting everything we love to last forever, and always being afraid of being eclipsed by the things we can’t change.”
Cultures around the world have a word for this wistful, bittersweet emptiness, she writes in an early chapter. In Portuguese, the word is “saudade”; her favourite, from German playwright Friedrich Schiller, is “sehnsucht.” She is less impressed with Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, who promised, “though you possess the world, you will yet feel miserable” – because, she asks, whoever truly feels like they own the world?
This world merits “The List,” or what an observer might call Dr. Bowler’s anti-gratitude journal. She started it with her best friend in university and now keeps it on her phone.
It’s a list of every grievance she can’t forget, or betrayal she can’t shake. The doctor who refused to consider her for a clinical trial and then made an offhanded quip about mortality made the list a while back. The friend who ghosted her recently is on it right now.
And if you already have your phone at the ready and don’t know where to begin, Dr. Bowler suggests this: Think of the story you always vent to the stranger on the airplane and go from there.
But what then? The task that Dr. Bowler proposes has a refreshingly low bar: Live in the real world and seek moments of joy as often as you can.
For Dr. Bowler, joy is found by visiting the world’s largest northern lake trout, or making gingerbread mega churches, or throwing a taste-test party for her friends. For her, joy is also transcendent and divine. Something will “ring her bell,” and she’ll feel it.
“It doesn’t take a road trip,” she says. You can experience it with friends, or alone. “But it does take saying ‘yes’ to the life that’s yours.” It requires our attention, which we give away too easily.
Toward the end of the book, Dr. Bowler has typed another three-word-phrase, over two pages, and this time, it reads like gentle acceptance: “There is more.” It’s simple math, as she titles her concluding section, “Living = The Ache + Joy.”
This summer, she and her best friend will attend the Calgary Stampede. At some point, they will go off together, and in whatever ritual they conceive, throw their record of grievances away.
The List is wiped clean every five years, and then, inevitably fills up again. Its contents are meant to be chapters, not endings, in a messy, human story where joy is possible, anyway.
