(Joyful, Anyway has been my favorite book through the first half of 2026. It’s perfect for anyone who has felt loss, struggled, or breathes).
We have a gap in our lives. It’s not financial, though we try to close it with money. It’s not relational, though we try to solve it that way too. It’s not physical. The gap is internal and it can’t be named. *The name that can be named is not the eternal name.*
We will call it the gap.
We notice it in the feelings of disappointment, guilt, and desire. I was meeting a friend, and the trials and shenanigans of parenting came up. We shared and compared mishaps – and I felt it. Instead of talking about my kids should I be with my kids? My oldest was leaving for college in forty days, and I was here instead. There it was, there was the gap.
I felt this parent / child gap a lot in 2025. One daughter is moving from high school to college. Another is driving and more independent. There were more moments of stillness, free of podcasts, to do lists, and notifications. Which is odd. Life can feel like being the person at the bottom of a slope in charge of emptying a (very important) bucket that’s constantly collecting water. Me versus the two infinite forces: gravity and time. We make life so full but it can sometimes feel so empty. That’s the gap.
So I acted, and begin to mark moments on a calendar. Graduation party. Marked. Project Hail Mary. Marked. Dinner out, coffee out, a ten minute hang out. All marked. Those narrow the gap.
But nothing closes the gap.
The gap, Kate Bowler calls it “the ache” in Joyful, Anyway, is permanent. It’s another infinite force, alongside gravity and time. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward. Life is a chronic condition.
I picked up Joyful, Anyway on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation and was pleased to see the blurb by Oliver Burkeman of 4,000 Weeks, a book about acceptance. Stop trying to be more productive, Burkeman writes, and instead choose to be more focused. Do the important things. Like seeing Project Hail Mary with your kids and accept that not everything you think needs to be done needs to be done.
Joyful, Anyway does not offer a solution. The secret algorithm!? No. Well, not that I think about it, maybe it does.
The Waiter's Pad 