Name: Crazy Joy
Rating: 4 (58 reviews)
Author: Mary Katherine Backstrom

What’s in it for me? Learn to find joy through life’s crazy.

What’s the difference between happiness and joy? For Mary Katherine Backstrom, or MK as she’s become known, the answer can be found in the garden.

Growing up in Alabama in the 1980s, MK always came home from school with a huge bouquet of purple flowers that she’d picked. Her mom would take them and exclaim, “How beautiful!”

But one day, MK arrived home empty-handed. Her mom asked why there were no flowers that day. Little MK was discouraged. She’d discovered that her favorite flowers weren’t flowers at all. They were weeds! Something with a dreadful name, too: henbit.

Now, MK’s mother was an avid gardener. She cultivated bounties of crawling roses and lush irises – the really hard stuff to grow. She bent down and explained to MK that flowers are finicky. They require the perfect conditions to thrive. But weeds are resilient and can survive anywhere.

Life often presents us with less-than-ideal conditions. It’s filled with ups and downs. And joy is kind of like henbit. It grows wherever it can, poking up through life’s cracks. Happiness, on the other hand, is rather precious, like a rose. Beautiful, but finicky.

In this Blink to Mary Kathrine Backstrom’s Crazy Joy, we’ll learn how to cultivate the wild weediness of joy in our lives guided all the while by MK. She may not be a scientist or a trained therapist, but she has gathered a lot of life experience.

We’ll draw on her humor and stories, as well as some popular culture and even philosophy, as we pick up joy and explore it from every angle. What will emerge is a new understanding.

May the joy be with you!

We tend to believe that we can only be happy when everything in our lives is perfect. When I finally land my dream job… If only I could afford my dream wedding… As soon as I shed that extra holiday weight… But the reality is, the quest for perfection only gets in the way.

We often try to cozy up beside things that we wrongly equate with joy. Things like social status, wealth, achievement, and beauty. But as soon as they’re in our grasp, we just start chasing the next thing. This type of happiness is fleeting.

On the other hand, anything that looks like the opposite of joy sends us running for the hills. Heartbreak, disappointment, failure? There’s no way these things will bring us joy! Best to be avoided at all costs.

The problem with this approach is that avoiding pain or discomfort so often leads to avoiding life. It’s the risks you take that lead you to joy. Sure, you might fall off the horse. But if you don’t at least try, you’ll never experience the thrill of galloping along the beach with the wind in your hair.

So what can you do? Where can you find joy? For MK, the key is to stop looking at the destination. Instead, joy is found in the journey. And the journey of life is filled with ups and downs. There’s no way to avoid that. In fact, heartbreak and failure are often signs of a life lived to the fullest.

In the next few sections, we’re going to explore some of life’s hardships that often feel like the furthest thing from joy – things like fear, insecurity, loneliness, and the ultimate killjoy itself, death. But if you learn to change your mindset, you can begin to find joy in even the darkest moments.

To do this, let’s turn briefly to Sir Issac Newton. That’s right, put your nerd glasses on because we’re about to get sciency. Newton’s third law of motion tells us that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

You can think of joy as a force. And as with all forces, it shows up in pairs. If you want to experience joy, you better be prepared for the counterforces that will inevitably pull on you: disappointment, heartbreak, failure, and sadness. They’re all part of life. But then again, so is joy.

The Thief of Comparison

Anyone close to MK knows that she’s not a baker. As much as she wants to have her own mother’s talent for whipping up towering cakes and gooey pastries, MK has come to accept her limitations in this department.

So what on earth compelled her to show up to her mother-in-law’s Thanksgiving dinner one year holding two store-bought pecan pies, insisting that she’d baked them herself? The answer is something that most of us, and especially mothers, know all too well: comparison. MK felt deficient for not being able to make her own pies like many of the other women in her life.

Death – The Ultimate Killjoy

One day, MK was writing at her favorite coffee shop when she struck up a conversation with a stranger. She told him about her research on joy and he recommended a philosopher to check out: Friedrich Nietzsche.

MK was skeptical. Wasn’t he the one who wrote about nihilism? That sounded like the opposite of joy. But she headed to the library and picked up a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And she was surprised to find a lot of wisdom about joy in that dusty old book.

Riding Waves Among the Sharks

MK’s husband, Ian, is a surfer. So she wasn’t surprised to come home one night to find him pressing play on Chasing Mavericks. It’s the ultimate surfer flick, based on the life of American surfer Jay Moriarity. He trained for months to surf the infamous Mavericks break off the coast of California, considered to be one of the biggest waves in the world.

But Jay’s training mostly involved holding his breath. Why? Because the trickiest part of the Mavericks break is basically a white wall of chaos. If a surfer gets caught there, it’s like being tossed around in the wash cycle. Holding your breath for a long time is key to surviving it.

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