Kate Bowler: Hey guys, okay, well today’s like a weird and surreal day. In a couple hours, I’m going to be headed over to the Today show because today is the launch. This is like when I can’t speak, I can only sing that my book Joyful Anyway is out in the world. Yeah, you know, and you just sit around looking into middle distance being like, how did this happen? Because before all the being, you know, all the talking about it, and the travel and the coming to see you on tour.

But I just, you know, wanted to take a second before I’m out there to say thank you. You know, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve been part of this story for a really long time. And I just wanted to say a bit about why this book exists in the first place.

Because I know the truth is that joy is a very strange thing to talk about right now. We live in a very peculiar, fractured cultural moment. And by almost every measurable standard, our life is both more comfortable than previous generations—more technology, more medicine, more convenience, more access to information. And yet fewer people can own homes, only some people have access to that medication.

We get same-day delivery for acne patches, but people in sub-Saharan Africa can no longer receive HIV/AIDS medication, which is available to us here. We have more access to information, which is also disinformation.

So like, look, if you’re listening to this while folding laundry or just scrolling through your phone and trying to find enough time to blow dry your hair, I know you feel the weirdness—the deep weariness, the loneliness, and the anxiety. The uncertainty about how we actually make sense of our lives.

And that belief may be—I thought Charles Mathewes, who’s a theologian, described it best when he called it our global withering of our capacity for joy.

I think that it’s also the right time to reexamine the solutions that were handed instead. Everywhere you look, someone’s going to tell you, like, just be happier, optimize your life, manifest good vibes, eat your 7,425,000,000 grams of protein that you’re apparently missing and should have surely perished by now because you are severely deficient in protein.

Look, I’ve been studying cultural stories that we tell ourselves about success and happiness for almost two decades now. I just don’t think we’ve ever gotten to a point where we have been so unsatisfied by what we’ve been offered.

We’ve had decades now of this story that if we have the right mindset and the right habits, when we unlock the right thing we were meant to have, it will come out of our sheer will. But life doesn’t ever cooperate with those promises.

This is the truth that we all know. Illness happens, grief happens, heartbreak happens. And even if nothing catastrophic happens, ordinary life finds a way to just lightly bleed us with paper cuts.

So I think that’s where this really began—what can we say now that we’ve been worn out by trying, and yet there is so much that still needs to be done in our world?

I’ve seen in the lives of the most unlikely people shocking joy. Joy in the eyes of people who are still carrying enormous pain and sorrow. I’ve seen it in hospital waiting rooms. I’ve seen it with people who tell me the hardest stories I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard it in the exhausted laughter of friends who have lost so much more than they ever expected to lose.

In the strange grace that appears in these ordinary moments when nothing about life feels… because joy doesn’t erase the pain. It just mysteriously, wonderfully shows up.

And that’s like the mystery I wanted to get to—what is better than happiness? This bizarre, mysterious joy.

Okay, I’m gonna just read you like one second of this. This is my Joyful Anyway. It has balloons—sad balloons. It’s like the stuff that makes me happy in my life is being like, can you make the balloon sadder?

So this is the part where I was sort of coming to terms with the fact that we all just look around our lives and we can’t believe these are the ones we have.

This is a chapter called The House, and it’s about the way our lives slowly fill up with responsibilities and relationships and expectations. And we’ve got these walls that hold our lives together.

People will walk you through their lives like a series of rooms. It’s an image that’s both ancient and divine. Our souls are like castles, observed St. Teresa of Avila, containing many rooms, and the very center is God.

But usually it sounds more like: welcome, don’t mind my mom hovering in the kitchen. Yes, that’s where Grandpa sleeps on the chair we’ve been trying to take to the dump since 1987. The mold issue in the basement is absolutely, without a doubt, the reason my sister has asthma—but we’re committed to gaslighting her about having allergies.

All the couches are dark to absorb stains because we usually end up eating in front of the television. And the most important feature is the lock on the bathroom door, so for the love of all that is holy, I can be alone for once.

We are surrounded by all the evidence of every choice we’ve ever made—the sofa, the wedding china, the relationship to that adult man playing Xbox. And every choice was handed to us as an inheritance: those in-laws, these freckles, his high school poster collection with the dog on a motorcycle that reads, “rebel without a bone.”

There’s a great word for what happens when we live intertwined lives: quiddity. It means the peculiarity, the essence of someone, the thing that makes them one thing and not another. Taken together, we see all the weird and wonderful specificity of the world.

Each room quiets. As my favorite poet-mortician—everyone needs to have one—Thomas Lynch describes, the room, once you vacate it, returns to stone and fire and a chair and the old coats. Animism in reverse.

The most obvious features of our lives are the walls, poured in concrete, lined with photographs. We accumulate so many loves and responsibilities and obligations that we need weight-bearing structures to shelter them in place.

A kid, another kid, parents, friends, dependents in all directions. Find me a human without burdens and I will point out that you are gesturing to a newborn baby, still dewy from birth, or someone yelling “woo!” on spring break.

We are desperate to become the kind of people who can shoulder it all. Why don’t we shoulder it all, guys? This is like the conversation I wanted to have.

What do we need to live lives we’re not gonna blow up because we love people so much?

Thank you so much for coming with me on this journey to figure out what the heck joy is—this ridiculous necessity. Because when we call out to the void, “is this it?”, joy is gonna call back: there is more.

So thanks, darlings, for being joyful anyway with me. There are still a couple seats available on tour and I would totally love to see you there for the next couple weeks. I’m going to be running around being a crazy person—come be crazy in the room with me.

And I’m gonna put the links to each city in the show notes. Last week we kicked off the tour in my most beloved Canada, which always heals something in my heart to be at home making Mennonite jokes.

And the Canadian bookstore Indigo even selected Joyful Anyway as their April staff pick, which feels like a peak Canadian achievement to me. I’m so excited—it’s just like right up there with hockey and finally asking when the city is going to fix the potholes.

So it’s like, win, win, win.

But truthfully, none of it exists without readers like you. So thank you for buying this book. They especially love it in your local bookstore. Thank you for sharing it with friends. Thank you for recommending it.

Thanks for just being the kind of person that wants to have the conversations about the stuff that matters most. It has been a joy.

So hey—wherever you are today, even if you’re not happy, may you know that you can be joyful.