Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, I knew I was going to be telling at least two kinds of stories in this book, and one was about grief and one was about love. And when you go and you survey the landscape of love stories, the vast majority of them are covert tragedies. They're love stories that get told because they either end in divorce or premature death. They darken drastically over the course of telling them.
And as a result, most of... What we read and hear and watch of love stories is either the beginning or the ending. We get the how did you meet and the kind of falling in love and all of the shiny, exciting romance and passion at the beginning. And either it just ends there, right? It ends with marriage.
It ends with getting together or having kids or, you know, there's just the kind of implicit or explicit happily ever after. Or we then kind of leap ahead to the destruction and dissolution of this much-longed-for state, whether through separation or death. And I found this curious because, of course, that leaves off the vast majority of most or at least many relationships, right?
Like, when you are happily together with someone, actually what matters to you is the middle. And actually what you want to have go on and on and on is the middle. But nobody writes about the middle, right? Like, there's very little about just the kind of day-to-day happiness and just texture of a happy life, which isn't just happy.
I mean, a lot of this book is about the kind of endless overlap and contradiction and friction and different emotions. And a lot of happiness is infused with annoyance or frustration or bad days or whatever it may be, but still somehow fundamentally feels for us that the deep an essential name you would give to it as happiness and that was interesting to me and I wanted to write about it.
I think that's absolutely true, but I don't think that's just true of happiness. I mean, yes, happiness is more than just happiness, but everything is more than just everything. I mean, there's this wonderful C.S. Lewis line about how you never encounter just cancer or just war or just happiness or just unhappiness. They are always incredibly variable in the lived experience of them.
There are good moments and hard times. There are hard moments and good times. And We want to act like that's the anomaly, but it's not, right? It's like the actual texture of life. And in fact, I think we would probably all be happier if we recognize that happiness is not a pure experience. Love is not a pure experience. Grief is not a pure experience.
All of them are always amalgamated with their opposite. And it's so sweet, actually, your awareness that someday this will seem wonderful and easy. And sure, of course, my life and my partner's life with two children and 17 book deadlines and whatever else may be going on is not the bliss of a first kiss when the world suddenly seems to be opening up and this entire new path is shining before you.
But I'll tell you, the path is beautiful. And part of what we don't, I think, pay enough attention to is the beauty of that path, of any path. And it's what I said earlier about duty. On some level, a beautiful thing about hard moments in marriage or in anything is like, well, you're doing this because you're committed to it, even in the moments that aren't just bliss and joy.
And like, do I want to take the compost out in the pouring rain as I did first thing this morning? Absolutely not. But do I want my partner to have to do it? Nope. Like, why shouldn't I, right? Like, isn't the better thing to do in this moment is to man up, as we used to say, and just go do the thing. And there's a kind of beauty in that and a kind of happiness and a kind of fulfillment in it.
And it's not the shiny, glossy kind, but it's what a lot of life is made of, right? And I do find it possible to regard it as, I don't want to say fun, you know, but purposeful and meaningful.
Well, probably happiness and duty is more sustainable. One can always be dutiful. There are always jobs to be done, work to be done, needs to be met in this world. And if you derive happiness from a sense of duty, I actually think that is an infinitely sustainable source.
And it kind of comports with my broad theory of happiness, which is, I think in our worst moments, the thing that can sustain us is serving others. I really do. And It's really powerful to remember that there are other needs in the world that other people have needs and that actually you can help meet them and ameliorate them in whatever small ways.
There's no community on earth that does not need your help. And it is good to get outside of your head and outside of your own misery. So if duty is part of your sense of happiness, you will never have to look far to replenish it. Fun. I love fun. Do not get me wrong. Fun is wonderful. Fun is amazing. my family and I were going to the beach this weekend and I honestly can't wait.
In a kind of narrowly defined sense of it, we don't have a lot of self-evident fun right now just because we have a three and a half month old, we have a three year old. We used to just jump in a car at the whiff of an interesting story or a fun thing to do and gallivant through the night. And that was really fun, right? And do I miss it? Sometimes, of course I miss it. And in that
kind of narrowly defined way, there's less fun in my life. On the other hand, children are infinite fun. I mean, children are hilarious, right? Like I've never had as consistent a source other than perhaps my father. I've never had such a consistent source of hilarity in my life as young children. They say hilarious things. They think hilarious thoughts. They do funny things.
They live with a kind of glee and humor that is contagious and interesting. So I'm certainly not here to diminish the value of fun. I actually think laughing is... It's just profoundly good for the mind and body and heart, and my kids make me do it all the time.
I can. William James was the guy who gave us this idea of the stream of consciousness, you know, this awareness that your mind is always full of thoughts, many of them unrelated to the task at hand or whatever you're looking at. It's just teeming with ideas and instincts and impulses and impressions from the world around you all the time. This constant flow of thoughts in our mind.
Sometimes we're paying attention to it, sometimes we're not. But as we all know from how difficult it is to meditate or focus or fall asleep at night, there's just always noise in our minds, you know, generating all these things. So William James writes about the stream of consciousness.
And in the middle of doing so, he, in this kind of odd way, sort of shifts metaphors and starts talking about the thoughts in our minds as birds flying around. And sometimes they're flying and sometimes they're perched somewhere.
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