TOWARDS JOY

Ben Nussbaum spoke with CYNDIE SPIEGEL about her latest book, Microjoys.

IN 2018, CYNDIE SPIEGEL published A Year of Positive Thinking, a book packed with practical ways to be more positive, including affirmations and exercises. Then Spiegel’s world fell apart.

“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know who that woman is anymore.’ The things I wrote in that book, I knew they still held true, but I couldn’t connect with it,” Spiegel says.

In quick succession—and during the pandemic—Spiegel lost her mother, had a nephew murdered, and then had to help care for her sibling, who suffered a stroke and spent two months in cardiac ICU. A close friendship came to an abrupt end. Then Spiegel herself was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In that calamitous time, “Something micro, smaller than small, felt like the best that I could do,” Spiegel remembers thinking. “I kept coming back to, what kind of joy and positivity can I find that is as small as possible that still counts, that still brings me moments of respite.” Her solution was to cultivate a practice of celebrating small, singular moments of joy—microjoys.

The distinction between joy and happiness is sometimes blurred, but we might all be better offdrawing a thicker line between them. Even though “happiness” has become an all-encompassing term for the good life, the origins of the word have to do more specifically with good fortune.

Happiness and unhappiness, in the original usage, were twists of fate, often short-lived ones. The expression “happy as a clam” is a shortened version of “happy as a clam in the mud at high tide,” when it can’t be dug up and eaten. When the tides turn, the clam might be someone’s lunch.