“I haven’t always been happy, but I’ve known joy.”

Also: there's always something to look forward to.

Travelers in Ubud, Indonesia. 📷

Last week I was busier than I’d prefer. Several things went wrong, including a weird problem at the dentist where I ended up walking out in protest before my appointment actually started. (If you feel uncomfortable or pressured in healthcare situations, walk away if you can.)

So now I need a new dentist, and that was just one challenge of the week. I won’t catalog the rest of them for you here, because you have a life too, and I imagine that it isn’t a perfect one. 

Hopefully, though, you also have a life in which you’ve known joy. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about when I haven’t been firing my dentist or dealing with other annoyances of life. 

I recently read the novel Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.¹ I ended up with a bunch of Kindle highlights by the time I reached the end, including this one:

What I want to say is that I was happy. Not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.

I liked that passage! And I identified with the core idea: I haven’t always been happy, but I’ve known real, deep joy. 

Having Something to Look Forward to Is Important*

*And there’s always something you can find to look forward to

This is another thing I try to keep in mind. No matter what’s happening in your life, whether it’s a week of minor challenges or when you’re in a truly dark place—you can always find something to look forward to. And this thing, whether it’s big or small, can be very helpful!

It’s not false optimism or toxic positivity. It’s more like, hey, some things are terribly frustrating (or even just terrible), and I can also anticipate something pleasing or exciting in the future. 

The other day I asked for examples from readers, and here’s what a few of you had to say: 

(If you missed it, feel free to add your response to the original note.) 

In both of these ideas—joy over happiness, and finding something to look forward to, “compass points” can be helpful. A few of mine are: 

• A sense of challenge

• Close and meaningful relationships 

• Purposeful work 

• A mostly-consistent routine: daily exercise, for example

I’ve been able to find them in even more serious times of hardships, too. Dealing with the dentist and other stuff has been a little stressful, but not the end of the world. 

Life goes on—and I’m looking forward to it.

P.S. Another quote from Martyr! that I liked: 

Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.

1. You have to respect a book with an exclamation point (!) at the end of the title. For years I’ve wanted to title a book in the form of a question, but haven’t found the right idea yet.