As an aspiring student at a Midwestern Christian liberal arts university, I took to heart the challenge issued by our long-standing university president: take the academic journey seriously. Long after his official role had ended, students would find the former president in the student union, having coffee with the grounds crew early in the mornings. He was famous for all kinds of sayings, for weaving humor and wisdom, depth and context, and most of all, for his impeccable delivery. Many of his anecdotes are still exchanged by alumni. One I recall vividly that felt both comforting and liberating to me, an 18-year-old who was mostly indifferent to intellectual pursuits, was some version of: You aren’t going to turn over a rock and find something that will eat God, so look everywhere for truth. 

It was likely more eloquently stated than that, but the general idea was, since there was nothing to fear in life or death, there was nothing to fear in thinking and discovery. Our job as students was to know and better understand, no matter where that would take us. It was an invitation to the best kind of deconstruction, the kind that is loving, that assumes wholeness, and that draws upon the liberal arts. In a Wendell Berry-like way, this vision of thinking is one that never sits well with convenient truths or popular plaudits, arrogance, and hot-take perspectives—liberal, moderate, or conservative. 

Over the past twenty years I’ve taken the words and the search for knowledge seriously most days since—pursuing graduating training, reading ferociously, searching high and low for the world’s best conversation partners and colleagues, and approaching new ideas with sincere openness, particularly when it comes to things that make me uncomfortable. This habit has emerged as radical intellectual curiosity. At times this inquiry has been rooted in traditional academic pursuits, and at other times, squarely and intentionally outside of the ivory tower. I’ve somehow managed to always remain faithful and in service to the vocation of turning over rocks and unearthing their assumptions. This practice of refusing to avoid unavoidable questions has become a core part of my identity as an educator and an integral part of my scholarly efforts to better understand how modernity, culture, and institutions work together to shape (and misshape) reality and thus what it means to be human. 

My experience and reflection on joy has followed this pattern. The very act of thinking can return me to the moments I have felt joy just as quickly as to those moments when it has been absent. I was concerned joy would be the kind of thing that this could evoke personal responses about experiences of having found joy but that could inadvertently leave out the important dimension of grief. I could imagine decrees from the initiated that joy is indeed possible, but that it wouldn’t land well for victims of gun violence and war. I found myself rehearsing these and other possible perspectives in my mind, increasingly furious over the platitudes-masked-as philosophies that I’ve heard over a lifetime around mostly happy, calm, often wealthy people who haven’t suffered much. Even the well-intentioned and radical Joy-as-Resistance framing can be hard to swallow in the moments you are sad or overwhelmed. Within a few minutes, the deepest parts of me knew that to attempt to encounter joy would involve wild and unmanageable terrain, both in me and out there in the world. 

Drawing equally upon my training in sociology and my own practice of staying fully present to what is, one of the ways I regularly think is through active imagination. When presented with a topic of inquiry, like joy, I visualize a circle of “thought companions”—individuals who differ in demographic charactersitics and life experiences who help me think. The emerging “companions” inevitably form a circle of guidance. Over the years of honing this practice, sometimes non-human images like ideologies or cultural forces populate these circles too. Recently, concepts like power, love, inequality, polarization, virtues, and anomie have made an appearance—at times personified, other times as object or spirit. Inevitably, things outside of us and outside of others affect our ability to get to clarity, and often these qualities have things to say. Taken together and drawing on their diverse voices and histories, these “companions” often shed light on a piece of a larger story or thought.
Given that grabbing on to cosmic realities like joy is slippery, often evading us the minute we find it, I’ve used the imaginative exercise described above to consider different perspectives and collect wisdom about what a person might expect if they were pusuing joy. I invite you to open your own imagination as you read on and consider a sort of map of five markers that might help you in your journey.

Dear Fellow Travelers:

We invite you to join us on the Good Path to Joy, the brief though recurring experience of the world as it should be. This journey is highly specific to you and your companions. You can begin from anywhere, but how you get there will very much depend on where each of you start. Throughout the journey ahead you’ll encounter stone markers along the path that will aid you in your arrival at joy. These markers will be obvious to you, though they have different shapes and sizes. Each of them points to suggestions for what to see along the way, what kinds of things to take with you, and which way to turn at crossroads.
Be on guard. In recent days, we’ve received word that despite our best efforts at keeping the path clearly marked, some rocks have appeared that seem to be impersonating the ones we’ve left. Some seem to have appeared quite naturally, the result of tectonic shifts and time, and others nefariously placed without regard for these lands. These are increasingly sophisticated deepfakes.

1. Trailhead

The first marker you’ll see will mark the beginning of the path. You can actively look for it or actively avoid it, though at times it may just appear before you. At this spot and whenever you encounter it, take off your shoes. Going barefoot is to remind you that this is not simply an intellectual quest, something to explore merely in your mind.

If you look under the stone marker, which will require some digging, you’ll discover all your preconceptions about joy. These preconceptions include every idea and thought ever written about joy, both its affirmations and negations, left here by the elders who took the path. The accompanying endnotes will share how these ideas have been helpful guides up to this point, the point of being led to seek joy. Now is the time you must leave yours here too, along with your concerns about what other people think joy is, your papers, tenure, citations, grants and endowments that have anything to do with joy. Acknowledge them for their hard work and give thanks. Name any hangups you have about your fellow companions—how they should look or what they should be, as well as any you have about following your intuition, feelings, or experiences. You’ll need to rely on these skills to get you through to the end. This path cannot be forced, deman­ded, or objectified, only felt.

2. Bypass

Another marker you’ll encounter, most likely just when your feet are starting to hurt, will have a sign with arrows pointing to other beautiful sites such as happiness or pleasure that are worth visiting in this region of the cosmos. Some arrows also will direct you towards places you’ll want to avoid, including pain and suffering. Both lists are alphabetized for ease. These places are breathtaking and distracting. They can be visited on the way to joy or as separate destinations. Since you’ll be tired, physically and possibly emotionally, some will seem quite attractive and others extremely repulsive. It’s important to know these trails are themselves bypasses that go around some important parts of the journey to joy, but on their own will offer views, waterfalls, and photo-ops. It is very easy to get lost on the bypass trails, particularly because of the impersonating markers. If you look under this rock, you’ll see messages, some regrets and some satisfactions composted throughout the ages from travelers who ended up on these bypasses, got stuck, but never made it to joy.

3. Warning

The third marker will be painted red, warning you that you are now entering a region that predators call their home, and several places nearby prone to rockslides and shifting sand. The warnings listed on the rock remind travelers to stay on the path, to avoid feeding wildlife, and to not hike after dark. Never hike alone. Recently, there have been increased reports of guides just across the border trying to sell you their services, promising to get you to joy for a small fee, and even apps some have downloaded that claim to map out the clearest path to joy. Do not trust any of them, particularly the shiny ones, they inevitably route back to the bypasses. If you look under this rock, you’ll find notes from some travelers who stopped and turned back and reviews of the apps with accompanying star ratings. There are notes from those who listened to the snake oil sellers, lost their fortune, and still never made it to joy. Some describe hauntings in this part of the path, sensing some presences that were both drawing them to and away from joy.

4. Directions

The map marker appears somewhat deceptively late in the journey with a signpost map, noting North, South, East, and West, Up, Down, In and Out. This is a good time to review maps and their accompanying ideas and instructions for all directions, if you are curious. Each of them was placed there by some goodhearted people who, coming from their own direction, decided they knew the way. These instructions are well-meaning attempts to direct you on a path to joy. They will seem helpful, offering insight when it is dark on where to turn left and where to turn right on the path, when to ask for help, how much it will cost, and how much you will receive if you arrive. The instructions outline how to carry yourself, what to wear, which bathrooms to use, appropriate ratios of women to men in your group, how many kids are allowed and how old they need to be and how much time their parents must be with them, when to smile and when to laugh so as to show you are near joy, when to cry and when to mourn when you encounter suffering. They even share what age is best for what kinds of joy. These can be helpful, but they each assume their direction is the only one and thus there is only one way to get to joy.

If you look under this marker, you’ll find notes from others sharing other orienting tools that can help you on the journey when you lose your way with the maps provided. These are soul maps made up of Poetry, Art, Dreams, scripture, visions, biographies, fire making instructions, herbs, dances, recipes, songs, prayers, and blessings that have helped people along the way. Use what is helpful, here.

5. Destination

When you arrive at the final marker, you’ll see a welcome sign that at the same time bids you farewell. This path is after all a labyrinth. We would have told you earlier, but we didn’t know it ourselves until we had been by it a few times, thinking we were lost. Most travelers forget they’ve been by it before only to see it again and suddenly remember they have been here before. If you look under this final rock, you’ll find all the letters from pilgrims since time immemorial sharing their own sense of the world as ultimately good and how they knew it to be. They speak of arrivals to joy and of departures, of journeys and their companions, of resistance to joy and joy as resistance. You’ll read of the sunrises and new dawns, the dark nights and waning moons, the paths not taken, sickness and health, and of so many children born and of those who didn’t make it. This is a moment to look around at your companions, but not to cling. Allow them to leave and linger in their own time.

This letter describes what my imagined companions—sociological archetypes to draw out complexities beyond my own experience and knowledge—might encoun­ter together on the path to joy. At the end of the journey, I believe joy is allowed rather than demanded, surprising and not to be managed, and experienced through connection. It is beyond our individual selves, available in instants to which we are always invited to notice, and sustained for varying amounts of time, distributed both in abundance and unequally. Joy’s full arrival—clearly seen and received by diverse companions—was made possible only by the weaving of each companion’s experiences of love and pain with that of all others in the circle. No stone could be left unturned.