Have you ever had a moment or experience, maybe even an entire season of life that was so hard, so filled with struggle and, maybe even, grief, loss and uncertainty, that the very idea of feeling or accessing any kind of big or meaningful or sustained happiness or joy just completely left you? And those well-intended folks around you who tried to refocus your heart and mind on good things and gratitude actually just made you feel even worse because the darkness you were navigating was so far beyond what platitudes can help? Yeah, we’ve all been there on some level.
But, what if, even in those moments where the big happy, or the big joy just isn’t accessible, there was still a way to dip into fleeting moments of lightness, or what my dear friend and guest today, Cyndie Spiegel, calls microjoys? One that gives you just enough of a glimmer of hope and connection, ease and maybe even laughter, that it keeps you going long enough to begin to emerge back into a state of more sustained spaciousness and possibility?
Cyndie is a speaker and best-selling author, founder of the social community Dear Grown Ass Women, a beloved storyteller-turned-writer and an igniter of power conversation who’s been featured in publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Glamour. Her new book, Microjoys: Finding Hope (Especially) When Life Is Not Okay, is a revelation. She first began holding on to what she calls microjoys during a devastating season that saw her mom pass from cancer, her nephew murdered, her brother struggling to recover from a stroke, and her own diagnosis of cancer, all while navigating a global pandemic. It was a seismic pile-on of suffering that completely vanished the prospect of any kind of meaningful or sustained happiness. But that very season also led her to an epiphany about what she calls “microjoys,” the practice of finding and taking note of fleeting moments of lightness, delight, surprise, serendipity, comfort and hope in her life, even despite the pain of it all. That’s what we’re diving into today, both the notion of microjoys, along with myriad ways to access these moments and experiences.
You can find Cyndie at: Website | Dear Grown Ass Women | Instagram
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Episode Transcript:
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:00:00] Micorjoys really came to be about honing the ability to find joy in spite of everything else. Grieving doesn’t need to be one way. The sort of foundation of Microjoys is about learning to hold joy in one hand, and grief in the other. At any particular moment, fall to your knees heartbreak, but also joy that is bigger than you’ve ever known possible. And sometimes you will experience that in the same breath, and what grace it is to allow ourselves to feel that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:32] So have you ever had a moment or experience maybe an entire season of life that was just so hard, so filled with struggle and maybe even grief, loss and uncertainty that the very idea of feeling or accessing any kind of big or meaningful or sustained happiness or joy, it just completely left you and those well-intended folks around you who tried to refocus your heart and mind on the good things and the gratitude. It actually just kind of made you feel even worse because the darkness, the struggle you were navigating was so far beyond what simple advice and platitudes could even begin to help you. We’ve all been there on some level. But what if, even in those moments where the big happy or the big joy just isn’t accessible, there was still a way to dip into fleeting moments of lightness or what? My dear friend and guest today, Cindy Spiegel, calls microjoys, ones that give you just enough of a glimmer of hope and connection, ease and maybe even laughter that it keeps you going long enough to begin to emerge back into a state of more sustained and spacious possibility. So Cindy is a speaker and bestselling author, founder of the social community Dear Grown-ass Women, a beloved storyteller turned writer and an igniter of power conversation who has been featured in publications like Forbes, entrepreneur, glamour, and more. Her new book, Microjoys Finding Hope, especially when Life is Not okay, is really a revelation. She first began holding on to what she calls microjoys, during a devastating season that saw her mom pass from cancer, her nephew murdered her brother, struggling to recover from a stroke and her own diagnosis of cancer, all while navigating a global pandemic. It was a seismic pylon of suffering that completely vanished the prospect of any kind of meaningful or sustained happiness. But that very season, it also led her to an epiphany about these things she calls microjoys the practice of finding and taking note of fleeting moments of lightness, delight, surprise, serendipity, comfort and hope in her life, even despite the pain of it all. That is what we’re diving into today. Both the notion of microjoys, what they are, how they show up, along with the myriad ways to access these moments and experiences. And Cindy shares some really beautiful and moving and powerful stories along the way. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:17] It’s always really kind of fun and interesting and different when I get to sit down with somebody who’s actually a dear friend, kind of chosen family-level friend, and have a different kind of conversation. The book that you’ve written, I was led into little bits and pieces of it in the background as you were working on it, and certainly the story and what happened unfolded in your life over the last chunk of years. Um, to see it finished and out there in the world is really beautiful. I’m excited to dive into some of the ideas, the stories, the insights, the invitations in the book also, which I thought was really cool that you made that choice. And I want to talk to you about that choice. But one of the early things that you actually start out saying in the book, which I thought was interesting and I thought it’d be Interesting point to dive in on is you write these few words where you say, I’ve only ever known impermanence. Tell me more about this.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:04:02] Yeah. I think looking back on the last few years, but also my life in general, and I’ve never really taken that bird’s eye view before the last few years. But as I did, I looked back and thought, wow, I don’t think I’ve ever expected that anything would last forever. We didn’t have any money growing up. We grew up in a very under-resourced neighborhood. Lots of drug addiction, alcohol abuse, just from a very young age. You know, my grandparents passed before I was seven years old. My maternal grandparents, I remember a friend in the fourth grade getting hit by a car and passing away. I talk in the book about being very present for the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, and losing a lot of young people that I knew that at the time I was maybe 10 or 12 years old. But in hindsight, these kids were 19, 23, 25. And you don’t always have that perspective of time until you’re far enough removed from it. But I think growing up with that lived experience really taught me, even if I never verbalized it, that no one is here forever. Nothing is forever. And I actually perceive that as having a lot of wisdom. I think that might sound sad to people, or it could be perceived as sad. But I think what I’ve walked away from, and what I understand today, is that the world really is impermanent. Everything is impermanent, and we have a culture that doesn’t like to talk about that. And I was able to move through these last few years, which were by far the hardest in my life, with an understanding of that. And so there were certainly things that I struggled with and grieved through and walked through. But I also never expected that any of these things would live forever.
Jonathan Fields: [00:05:51] I mean, it’s interesting we do have I feel like in, in our culture, this just abject. It’s not even a fear of talking about impermanence. It’s like a cultural normalization of like, we don’t go there. It’s not okay to go there. It’s not polite in, you know, like conversation. You as a human being shouldn’t go there because it’s such a downer. It’s so dark. Like, that’s the thing that, you know, that is certain in every person’s life and shall never be talked about. And like what you were just saying, though, acknowledging that there’s so much that goes along with acknowledging that and actually like making a present in your life on a regular basis that is powerful and empowering and freeing. I wonder what we take from ourselves by not allowing anyone to have that conversation, or even to let their mind wander into that place.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:06:39] I agree, I agree because I, I just think there’s so much wisdom and understanding that everything is temporary. You know, I think we’re starting to see in our culture a lot more on social media. I’m following a lot of death doula accounts, a lot of hospice nurses. Um, partially having gone through that experience with my mom. To me, it’s very hopeful because if we know that there is an end, it doesn’t mean it’s tomorrow. We live very differently today. We live more presently today. But when we don’t, we can tend to take things for granted. You know, we have everything. Always. These traditions will always be there. These people will always be alive. We don’t value them in the same way, and we are not as present in the same way when we don’t consider that they will be temporary.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:30] Yeah. Or that we will be temporary.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:07:33] 100%.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:34] So from your upbringing, you end up in New York City. You end up a couple years down the road in the New York fashion industry, which is fast, which is furious, which is super high profile. You find yourself rising up, building a stunning career jet setting around the world some 15 or so years into that, you make this really interesting, sort of like hard turn ahead and say, you know what? This isn’t working for me anymore and start to really just reimagine your life, your career, the work that you’re doing, who you are, what you want to do. Like what is the next season of life look like? You’re a couple of years into that, building some amazing experiences, building community, writing books, speaking. And then as didn’t just happen to you like 2020 hits and the world is sort of like flattened by the pandemic. That alone would have been and was devastating for literally hundreds of millions, billions of people. Your experience of the years between 2020, and I would imagine even to a certain extent now, the last 2 to 3 years wasn’t just that. It was almost like this. Impossible. Piling on of that and that and that and that. Talk me about these years. Talk to me like. Share the unfolding that has been your life over these last couple of years.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:09:00] Up until 2020. I was on an upward trajectory, you know, as you said, I left the fashion industry and I sort of stepped right in and had been figuring out this new way and speaking and writing and things seemed to be going well. They were, in fact, going really well. 2020 happened, and there was a global pandemic, which we talked about. But in May, May 29th of 2020, my 32-year-old nephew was walking to a friend’s house and he was murdered. Now, this was the same week George Floyd was killed. So there was this echo everywhere of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. It was finally landing on the global stage, as it should have been. And then there was the very real lived experience of my nephew, who was a young black man being murdered. And it became deafening. Everything I believed to be true about the world shook in that moment. And, you know, I could obviously spend the next hour talking about that. But what happened shortly after that was four months later. My mom, my beloved mother, who you know, anyone who knows my work, knows. I’ve always talked about my mom and her influence. My mom died, and I will often say this about those two incidents that my mom helped to raise. My nephew and my brother was only 18 when my nephew was born. When my nephew was killed, he was actually living with my mom.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:10:27] So she’s the one who answered the door at 2 a.m. to the police, letting her know that her grandson was killed. I often say about their relationship that I believe she at least partially died of a broken heart. Four months later, she died. She was certainly not healthy, but we didn’t expect her to die. And it happened. Her her decline happened very quickly, and I recall early on trying to talk to her about my nephew. And I would say, mom, are you okay? Are you okay? Because she seemed a little too okay. And she said, you know, I just can’t think about it. And that’s why I seem okay. She could not wrap her head around it, and I didn’t fault her for that. I understood, I didn’t expect none of us expected such a quick decline on her part afterwards, but nonetheless, um. In September, on September 22nd of 2020, she passed away. And that left my brothers and I to plan her services. And so we did. But it was in the middle of a pandemic, and so we could only have 25 people at her service. And just to quickly go back about my nephew again in the middle of a pandemic, this was two months after the pandemic Dimech started, we could have 1010 people at a young man’s service, which meant my husband waited in the car like, there’s so there’s so many layered pieces of that time in my life.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:11:51] So we, you know, my nephew passed away. My mom passed away a month after my mom passed away, my 49-year-old brother went into cardiac arrest. He had a stroke. He went into cardiac arrest again, completely out of nowhere. He spent the next ten weeks in the ICU. That was sort of it for us. My oldest brother, who had just lost his firstborn son, and my mom. We were now together having to become caretakers for my other brother because again, at this point in the pandemic, there were no visitors and there certainly weren’t visitors to the ICU. So we would take turns. We would call three times a day at 9 a.m., at 4 p.m., and at 10 p.m.. I will never forget these times because it was the changing of the shifts, and we were very careful to make sure we left enough time for the new ship to get on, but we called three times a day for ten weeks straight because we wanted to ensure that my brother was cared for and we couldn’t be there. So we needed the staff to know that no matter how hard they were working, we wanted them to know that he was loved. And so that’s what we did.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:12:58] And I say this in the beginning of the book, but to this day, when I hear the sound of music, that on-hold music, when you call a credit card company or something, it still makes my heart skip a beat because I can’t unhear that music from listening to it at this pivotal moment in my life. So by the grace of who knows who, my brother did make it home. Ten weeks later, and just as we thought everything was starting to settle, the dust was starting to settle and we would find some new normal. I had started to catch up on my doctor’s appointments that all of us sort of postponed for that first year of the pandemic, and was quickly diagnosed with breast cancer. It came out of nowhere. I could not have expected it. There were no lumps. It was so far afield from anything. I thought that was possible. But it was nonetheless. And quickly thereafter, they found another spot with breast cancer. You know, I feel very lucky in the sense that it was early-stage breast cancer. So I went through, I don’t know, 26. I almost can’t remember 26, 28 sessions of radiation. I didn’t need chemotherapy. We live by, you know, one of the best cancer hospitals in the world. And I moved through that time. But truthfully, I didn’t tell my brothers about my breast cancer diagnosis until about six months ago.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:14:15] And the only reason I told them then was because the book was coming out, and it’s mentioned in the book. But I remember when I did finally sit down and tell my brothers about it, my oldest brother started bawling. I’m sure he’ll love that. I’m telling everybody this, and my my younger brother just froze up and I was sitting between my two older brothers. They’re both older than I am, and I made sure to be really light and to laugh about it because I didn’t know. I didn’t want to break their hearts again. And I felt like as a family, we had lost so much that I didn’t want to do that to them. And so until I absolutely had to tell them I wouldn’t. And when I did, I made sure that it was very light. I laughed, I made jokes because that’s what we do in the Spiegel family. We make light of things. And so that was a very long answer. But that was the the long and short of it. And then there were the two years that followed that and or the year and a half that followed was me really trying to find my way back to myself. And that’s how Microjoys came about. Yeah, it was a bit of a me coming home.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:18] Moving through any one of those things. And also for context, um, you lived in Brooklyn, in New York City for a long, long time and ended up moving just outside of the city. But you were, you know, like this was also going on during the pandemic in the New York City area when New York was the scariest place on the planet, right? I was there also, um, and to have that level of things piling on and piling on, piling on, piling on. Um, and I remember when you first shared with me about your diagnosis, which was quite a while after the fact also. And I was stunned. And I was I remember, literally remember and I and I was like, how do I feel? But also it was interesting for me to sort of like, know that you had made this decision that you needed to go through this in the way that you needed to go through it. You had so many other things going on in your life that it was like the decision had to be simply about, what choice do I need to make for me to be as okay as I can humanly be in this moment in time, and then in the next, and then the next, and you’ll figure out how to deal with conversations with friends and family down the road when it feels more accessible to you. And it was interesting because it took me a beat to process that. Also, just as a friend, and I’m sure you’ve probably had similar conversations with other people over the last year or so as you’ve sort of like slowly had the conversations with them.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:16:42] Yeah, I’ve had all sorts of reactions. You know, I have very good friends. I have such solid people in my life, and I’m really grateful for that. But I still had the gamut of emotions. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have been there for you? To friends breaking down in tears. It’s been everything and I understand everything. But I’ve also come to know over the last few years, Jonathan, that I can’t hold it because I understand it. Right. You know, I had experienced so much kindness and so much empathy from folks. After the loss of my nephew and my mom, I didn’t want to be the person who couldn’t handle their own life. And I also knew that this compound loss, I wasn’t special. This happens to people. It didn’t make it any easier, but I also recognized it helped me to recognize that I am not the only one. And in this moment, I need to just put one foot in front of the other. That’s all I can do. I can’t have to explain this to people. And something that eventually also became really clear to me was I wanted to own this narrative myself. I think when you are diagnosed with anything folks want to, there’s a certain natural ownership for people who have been in similar situations or feel like they understand you, and then it becomes their narrative. You know, I am now part of a group that I didn’t choose to be a part of, and I wanted to be mindful that I was in a strong enough place to stand on my own two feet and say, this is what actually is true. And I don’t identify with this. Like, breast cancer is not who I am. It’s an experience that I lived through that God willing, I won’t go through again. But you know, that could change. But I want to be really careful that that narrative isn’t ripped away from me as being Cindy, the breast cancer survivor. I am so many other things, so it was important that I managed my diagnosis on my own, in my own way, and kept it very close to to my heart.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:45] Yeah, I totally understand that. You know, it was interesting also because as you’re sort of stepping into the last year, year and a half or so and sort of saying, okay, so where do I go from here? Like, who am I? What is my life like? What do you know? Like how much agency do I have and what do I want to create? Um, and also just dealing with a huge amount of loss and grief. Right. Which is it? I remember years ago, Liz Gilbert was describing, like, her loss, and she called them carve out moments. She’s like, I’m just walking down the street and my knees buckle, and it is what it is. And I cry and I deal with it and then I move on. You had written, I think it was about two years before all of this. A book became a huge selling book called A Year of positive thinking, which is like a whole bunch of different things to effectively do and think about to for positive thinking when you’re in this moment of such profound grief and loss. Reflecting back on that book, and the ideas and the tools and the tips and the strategies and the prompts that you had written two years earlier, do you feel like those were accessible to you in that moment in the state that you were in?
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:19:50] Absolutely not. I feel like a Year of Positive Thinking was a book I could write in 2018, and it is not a book I would write today. Now I just want to say the words in a year of positive thinking are absolutely true even today. But microjoys, which we’ll talk about at some point, is really the extension of where I was then. The pithy, the quotes, the simplicity of a year of positive thinking I don’t want to under like this has changed people’s lives. It has helped them to access positivity in ways they couldn’t before, and I am grateful for that. But it is not a book that I could go back and read to be of any source of comfort for me in the midst of the hardest things. Essentially, I needed something that spoke to both the grief and the difficulty, as well as the joy and the possibility. And that’s not what my first book was. That wasn’t the intent of my first book, but I knew that I after my nephew was murdered, I could no longer recognize myself in those words. It no longer felt connected to me in any way, and I certainly couldn’t open that book and say, whew! Now I feel better. I had literally fallen to my knees, and the words in that book were not going to pull me out of where I was.
Jonathan Fields: [00:21:10] And we’ll be right back. After a word from our sponsors. You use this phrase microjoys a couple of times, and in fact, it’s the name of your most recent book. So when you’re in that spot and you’ve fallen to your knees and you’re realizing you’re like, whatever tools or strategies or things I could think or advice that may have sort of helped me just coast along, given me access to what I’ve heard you describe as like big happy, you know, in the past, like it’s just not there right now. And it may be a long time before I can go to that place again. But that doesn’t mean that joy has to completely cease to exist in my life. But you have to step into it differently. And I guess that’s where sort of like this exploration of the concept of microjoys really comes from. So take me into sort of like the genesis of this, of both. Just the understanding. Yeah. How joy in some way, shape or form might still play a role in your daily existence that leads to this sort of like really fun term microjoys.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:22:13] It’s interesting because I wish I had given the name of this book more thought, honestly, but the title just clicked for so many people because after my nephew was killed, I remember very consciously thinking, I can’t be upbeat, positive, Cindy, right now. I don’t have it in me. And that’s what people had come to expect. Sassy, but also positive, you know? And I was not her. I was not her. I was sad, I was grieving, I was broken, but I also knew that there were glimmers of hope and that I deserved some sliver of joy despite everything. And so it’s very easy to assume that microjoys simply means small joys, things you see day in and day out. And to be clear, that’s not that’s not my intent behind the word or the title of the book. Instead, microjoy is really came to be about honing the ability to find joy in spite of everything else. The sort of foundation of Microjoys is about holding, learning to hold joy in one hand and grief in the other at any particular Moment. And so as I started to slowly tell memories very publicly or share memories about my nephew online, I realized that they brought me joy.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:23:30] You know, I would smile, I would think about this kid with these huge eyes, you know, in kindergarten, graduation and this big white robe that was way too big. And these things brought me moments of happiness and glimpses of joy. And so I started to call these moments, whether they were memories or something really cool that I’d experienced or, you know, a special gift that came, they became microjoys. And really, what they were were these moments that I’d experienced where it wasn’t very far reaching to find them, to access these joys. They were there. They were with me every moment. So that’s the term. It’s not about small joys, but instead it’s about honing this ability to hold both things at once. So it’s it’s much more nuanced than my first book was. And to me, culturally, where we are in this moment, I want to say coming out of a pandemic, but who the hell knows? Um, as we move forward, I think we all need to reconsider what our narrative is for joy, because that outdated belief and toxic positivity like this. Good vibes only bullshit. Like that’s just not it. And as a world, we are grieving the loss of millions of people and we have to learn a new way.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:24:49] And sometimes that means simply leaving space for the difficult things and not punishing ourselves, or feeling shameful for feeling a moment of joy when you’re in the midst of grieving. Because I think that’s that is so toxic when we can’t allow ourselves even a sliver of joy simply because we are grieving. And to go back to what we talked about earlier, about impermanence, right. It’s like if we set up our culture to understand that everything is temporary, then there would be this wide spectrum of emotions that are acceptable. But because we don’t want to talk about anything being temporary, um, when we are going through this kind of loss or any kind of loss, right. It could be losing a job. It could be losing a sense of self. Whatever it is, we feel like we should only feel one way. And this book is really about feeling multiple ways and sometimes simultaneously, and leaving the space to feel all of it at once fall to your knees. Heartbreak, but also joy that is bigger than you’ve ever known possible. And sometimes you will experience that in the same breath. And what grace it is to allow ourselves to feel that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:05] Yeah, and I also, I don’t want to skip over. You used a word which is shame. I don’t want to skip over that, because there’s the notion that when you’re going through great struggle, great loss, was great upheaval or anxiety or just straight up sustained fear and groundlessness, which almost everybody has been over the last few years, that you shouldn’t have access. There is something that is, quote, shameful about you, just like having access to something which makes you laugh out loud or like because it’s almost like, you know, you don’t have the right or the privilege to buy yourself out of this experience that like, you know, you just have to be in and especially when when that experience and that feeling becomes the fabric of society, it becomes the norm. Then you saying, but there are still moments where, like, I loved and I laughed and I giggled and, you know, like I reflected and it was awesome. It makes you an outlier. And it’s sort of like, who are you to feel that when we’re all feeling this?
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:27:08] Yes, yes. I remember after my nephew was killed having this very visceral response to finding any humor or joy, because I didn’t want my family or my nephew’s family to feel as if I didn’t care. And so I didn’t want to feel these moments of joy. And of course, no one would ever say that to me. But that was how it felt like, I can’t be too much of this. And what I’ve come to know is that very few things in life are absolute, right? Like, grieving doesn’t need to be one way. In fact, some of the biggest microjoys that were experienced at that point were together as a family telling stories about my sarcastic ass Jewish mother or my nephew whose humor was so dark. Like, those were the things that brought us all so much joy. And it wasn’t until it became collective with my family that I felt like it was okay to feel those things. And as a culture, I think we have a long way to go in allowing people to feel multiple things.
Jonathan Fields: [00:28:19] Yeah, I feel like that’s also a uniquely American thing. Yes, I feel like other cultures, whether it’s more eastern cultures or even, I mean classic Irish wake, you know, it’s sort of like there’s something about not just Western culture, but specifically that’s unique to American culture, which mandates that we must all be a certain way. And that is like and that even if you’re feeling these things, you can’t share them. But it’s interesting for you also, particularly in that, as you’ve described it, as I’ve known from just you personally for years, your personal culture and your family culture is joy, is family is humor is snark. So to be able to revisit that or to be able to bubble that up, it’s almost like a reclamation saying like this horrible, horrible thing has happened and yet this is still us.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:29:07] That moment that you just described or that that culture of my family. You’re spot on. But that moment I remember feeling, after all of this loss, sitting with my brothers at the dining room table at my mom’s dining room table and laughing so hard that we both cried and laughed at stories that we told about my dad, who passed away many, many years ago. My mom, my nephew, and this sense of like, this is who we are. This is who our family is. Again, you know, when I think back to growing up, we never expected that people wouldn’t die. I know many adults in their 40s and 50s and 60s who still haven’t lost people. And I think, shit, what a privilege, I think. And I say that because there’s been so much wisdom from losing people. But in that moment with my brothers where we’re literally laughing and crying at one time, that is sort of the power of allowing ourselves to feel all things. And it really did feel like, okay, we are going to be okay. Like me crying in a corner and there are so many moments. There will always be moments of that that didn’t feel like all of me. But this moment where we were laughing and crying collectively, that to me was like, oh right, this is who we are. We hold all of it. We hold all of it. This is what we do, and this is what we’ve always done. And I hope that is an experience that more of us can feel, this sense of full acceptance of all of it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:30:42] And I mean to me that that hope is the driving force behind your book. Yes. You know, it’s sort of like saying, okay, so something happened to me, a switch flipped in me. And then I got really curious. You know, it happened in this moment at the table where we’re laughing and crying simultaneously. But what about all the other moments? And are there are there things that we can do intentionally or observe intentionally or ways that we can be that might give us more access to this. We’re all going to go through hard things. We’re all going to suffer. We’re all going to struggle. But can we actually are the things that we can do where as we’re moving through them, we still have those moments available to us, which I think so many of us would like to have and believe is possible right now. You lay out in the book. I mean, you share sort of like the fundamental ideas behind microjoys. A lot of which we’ve explored. And then you lay out, I think it was about 50 essays which describe vignettes, stories from your life going all the way back to like, you know, recent moments and then invitations or prompts at the end of each of these. I would love to go through some of those because I think each one of them is both telling, but it’s also they’re great invitations for everyone listening to be like, oh, well, maybe I can explore this a little bit. One of the early ones is sort of like your experience around spices and spice shops.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:32:02] Oh yeah. So the first thing I would say before I get into any of that, is in order for me to have really understood the fullness of microjoys, I had to sit in my grief. Because microjoys are a really foundationally, it’s accepting all of it. And so we don’t reach this place by escaping the hard stuff. We reach this place of recognizing microjoys when we can experience the contrast of the hardest times. And with the Spice Shop in particular, it was in Brooklyn. It’s sahadi’s. It’s been around for 100 years at least, and every week I would go into the shop and it is one of those magical places to me where the smells, the lines, the food, the languages. I just remember after all of this happened, going back to Brooklyn and visiting Sahadi’s and feeling so present for all of it. Now this is a store that I went to day in and day out when we lived in Brooklyn Heights. I had never experienced it as much as I did that day because I was so present. I listened, I felt, I smelled, I tasted the food, and I remember walking out into the winter day feeling so alive. I couldn’t tell you about most visits that I had to sahadi’s. But that one, three years later, I could still tell you about it in detail. And that is the power of being present, allowing everything else temporarily to fall away. Now that temporarily piece is really important, right? Because we can’t walk through life ignoring most things.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:33:48] But when we allow ourselves the grace of being present in any moment, the way that I did that day at Sahadi’s, it becomes so tangible and it becomes a place that I can always go back to. So now, if I need to sit down and think of something that brought me joy, I can think in detail about that winter day that I went to Sahadi’s. So presence, being present and really practicing being present while also acknowledging right, that we can’t always be that way. But can we take a half an hour once a week? And I don’t want to make this prescriptive. And I remember actually, Jonathan, you and I talking about this before I wrote the book and I said, I don’t want to tell people how to feel anymore. I don’t want to tell people what to do. And we had talked about that for a while because you said, yeah, no, I haven’t wanted to tell people what to do for a long time, you know, and this book is not about telling people what to do. It’s not about telling you how you can access all of the microjoys. It’s about sharing my own lived experience and giving you something to consider, like consider being present in moments, particularly when you are struggling or in a difficult time. Take a moment and consciously choose presents something else that I walked, and moving out of that period of time with is the power of memory, the power of tradition, of writing things down. I tell an essay in the book now I am bluish, right? I am a black Jew.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:35:17] My mom was such a Jewish mama. I mean, she loved through food. I tell you know, I’ve written essays in the book about my mom’s food, and about a year or so before she passed, I remember she was wanting to get me a birthday gift or a holiday gift. I don’t remember what. And I said, you know, I don’t want you to buy me anything. What I would love if you would start to write down the family recipes. Now, over the year, we’ve had the same recipes. You know, they’ve been typed up 16 different ways till Tuesday and we’ve lost them. They’re stained with, you know, pie. They’re they’re a mess and they’re pulled into multiple cookbooks. And I knew that we had the recipes, but I wanted them in my my mom’s old hand, like her own handwriting. And so as best she could, she spent the next year handwriting the recipes for me. That to this day when I open that book, I can feel my mom, not only because I see her handwriting, but because Mama Shelly was giving me notes on how to be in the world. Like she would give me a recipe, and then she would say, and don’t forget, don’t walk away from the stove. Because if you walk away from the stove, you’re going to burn the pot. And if you burn the pot, like she’s literally giving me this sort of motherly advice, and I don’t know where I had the forethought to ask for that, but it has really reminded me to write down memories, because when we lose our people, we lose a bit of our grounding and having those memories to go back to and keeping them somewhere where we can go back to them is a really beautiful way to activate a microjoy.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:36:54] Another one is to be in conversation with friends and ask them to remind you of funnier times. Of silly situations that you’ve been in. Because again, in the hardest of times, I couldn’t come up with anything. I just couldn’t. But our friends and our family become our memory keepers. You know, we remember things about other people that we don’t remember about ourselves. And, I mean, it was amazing the stories that were told that made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt even in the midst of everything, because I could choose to talk to friends and say, can you remind me of a better time? So presence is really the foundation of microjoys. Allowing yourself to be present, not just physically, to experience the space around you, but to experience the conversation that’s being had. To experience the details that are surrounding you, to listen to what is happening and to just be in it. And what was equally important to me was sitting around doing nothing, which is not something I have ever been comfortable with. And truly, at this point, I feel like I’ve sat around for the last year doing a lot of nothing and what a gift it has been. And when I say doing nothing, I don’t mean I literally spent 365 days sitting in a chair, but the idea of sitting in a chair for two hours watching my cats or plants or looking out the window.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:38:23] It has created a calm in me that I have never experienced. So these are all microjoys. These are things that in the what I now refer to in the before times I wouldn’t have been present for I wouldn’t have known to experience. And they are incredibly important. And there is no me going back to who I was pre 2020. This is who I am now. I am a woman that is more present and I don’t feel like I have any. I didn’t choose this necessarily, but what a gift it has been. What a gift it has been. And I don’t think that I could ever go back to who I was before, because the world has changed and I have changed, and microjoys have truly been a tool for me to move forward. And I try not to say move on, because I think it’s just, again, one foot in front of the other. But when we allow these moments to sink in for us, these memories, these thoughts, these feelings, these words to truly matter, then we always have the ability to access them when we need them most. But if we move through the world not paying attention and expecting that everything will be there forever and not truly understanding or seeing what is, we can’t go back and access these beautiful experiences because they’ve gone.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:44] It’s like if we weren’t there for them when they happened, they won’t be there. When we look back and try and sort of call them up.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:39:51] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:52] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, it’s so interesting you use the word presence a lot. One of the things that keeps happening in my mind, as you’re saying that is attention, awareness. I’m like, my brain is making that translation, which is because my brain is saying, pay attention to what is happening both around you and within you. Because I think if a lot of people hear that phrase, we’ve all heard the phrase be present. I struggle to understand, like, what’s the action? Like how how do I be present? And for me, and maybe it would be. Maybe people listening are like, I get it. I just need to be here now. I need to be present for some reason in my brain when I think about, okay, so there’s this thing called the tension in my head, and I have some ability to direct it, even if it’s just fleeting and for a heartbeat, and then it moves somewhere else. If I think to myself, like, direct your attention to how you’re feeling inside in this moment, direct your attention to what’s happening around you right now, even just for a heartbeat.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:54] You can do those two things for him. Pay attention to how am I feeling, what’s going on around me and to me? If you do those two things over and over throughout your day and then your week, and then your month and years and your life, that just makes you more present, you know? It gets you to that place. Um, I love also the way that you play with the notion of time, because I think that’s a lot of what you don’t talk about it explicitly in the book. And we haven’t actually had this conversation. But as I was reading through, what kept coming to me is you’re really talking about this really interesting relationship of moving through time, like being absolutely here in the immediate moment, moving all the way back, projecting forward, and in a way, honoring and giving equal value to the way that all of those windows make you feel. And I was wondering how intentional that was when you sort of laid it out that way.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:41:49] Is a beautiful observation, because I don’t think I’d thought of it that way until you said it. But in the book, you know, there are essays from me being a small child, really sort of moving into where I am today. And I don’t know if that was intentional. I’d love to take all the credit. But I think, again, as I was tapping into and accessing moments of joy, I was just grasping for where I could find them. And sometimes that was me being a child, and sometimes that was me being a 20 year old. It wasn’t intentional. But again, you know, when I think of impermanence, when you see the world through that lens, I hold value. There’s just as much value in being a child as there is in being a 45 year old woman. I don’t know that I differentiate any value from one part of my life to another. I think it’s all equally important. And so to answer the question, it was not by design, but I do think it has been incredibly helpful to see the world through that lens because again, we don’t forget.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:51] Mm. It’s interesting because the, um, when I was a kid, I was a gymnast and very early, I was also a complete nerd, as I remain today. Um, and so I’m always, like, fascinated by the body and somatics and science. And I remember reading a study literally at 16 years old, I think, that talked about how when we visualize our body going through particular moments, like as a gymnast, I would visualize my me going through my full routine that activates all the same muscles in our body, as if in all the same neural circuits, as if we were actually performing that routine with our body, and that you could actually practice and improve skills by simply visualizing on a repeated basis. And that came up as I was sort of like reading through like and going back in time with some of your stories, because it really, I think we diminish the power of being able to just close our eyes and reminisce and literally take us back in a sensory way to something, and how our brain actually experiences, almost as if it’s happening again in real time. And that happens to us in a negative way all the time. Like so many of us know the power of that when it’s like anxiety and regret, you know, like we hit spin about what might happen in the future that we don’t want to happen.
Jonathan Fields: [00:44:10] And we we hit spin when we think about the bad things that happened in the past, and we just can’t let them go. We know how viscerally that affects us, how real it is to us. But the invitation that you’re saying is, well, if that’s that real to you, what if you actually put yourself back there to those awesome moments? Wow. Like the giggle fest, the times where you literally like you were hurting yourself because you were laughing so hard, or you just with somebody where it was so poignant and beautiful that it moved you to tears. Well, you know, I can think about the first time hearing a piece of music or seeing a painting that literally moved me. And if I close my eyes and I can hear it or see it and I’m back there, and the beautiful invitation that I feel like you’re offering is saying, like, maybe you actually don’t have access to that feeling in the circumstances of your life at this moment in time. But if you had it in the past, you still have access to the feeling.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:45:06] That is so beautifully said, right? It is this well that we have that when we move through the world too quickly, we forget what is in the well. We have all of these beautiful moments that we’ve experienced regardless of our situation. Right? They’re there, but we have to go back. We have to be willing to go there. And our world is such that there’s something grabbing our attention all the time. So taking the time to really be willing to go there and think about it. The idea is that even when we are in the most difficult of times. We have to grant ourselves these moments of grace to go back to who we were when we laughed so hard that we cried, because maybe right now we don’t have it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t. And you just so beautifully verbalized that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:45:58] You’re one of the other things that I feel is a theme of what you explore is the notion of getting quiet. And that doesn’t necessarily mean being alone or it doesn’t, but the notion, because it relates to what you were just saying. Like, we live in a culture which is largely go, go, go more and more and more. And when you ask somebody, well, how much is enough? The answer inevitably is just a little bit more, right? You know, and you ask them a year later and the answer never changes. And there’s a really powerful invitation in your writing and your stories in this conversation. Like, if there was no more, you know, if this wasn’t if this had to be enough and you just had to get still with that and find as much joy and grace and, you know, whatever that feeling is you desire in the here and now. Like, how could you do that? There’s like an inside joke for longtime New Yorkers, and probably a lot of other folks get it also there. There are things that New Yorkers do, you know, like, you know, on a Sunday morning in New York, maybe not anymore because it’s all digital. But like in a for a lot of years, on a Sunday morning in New York City, like literally every person in New York was sitting on a like an old couch or lying in bed with, like, the pound and a half piece of paper. That’s the Sunday Times and a cup of coffee, spending a couple hours just pouring through it. And you write about this, you know, like your hands are inky. By the end of it, you’re not doing anything constructive. But that was a glorious couple of hours of your week and you weren’t trying to achieve anything. And I think we diminish how beautiful those moments can sometimes be.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:47:35] I try not to use though. I am a Yogi and a meditator, I tried not to use that language in this book and instead to normalize regularly. It’s kind of going in the back door, but really it does come down to being quiet, right? And and appreciating these moments that we often take for granted and sitting in them like reading the Sunday paper while sitting on my sofa. There’s so much opportunity for us to do this. And my hope, really, with microjoys, is that folks who read these excerpts and these essays, they you don’t have to remember Cindy’s story. The idea, instead, is remembering how these stories made you feel and what you can take away from them. You don’t need to remember anything that I wrote in this book about me, but my hope is that you will find yourself in these scenarios because every day, day in and day out, we’re doing really basic, boring things that when we sit and experience them, we realize the beauty and the quietness of them and the not doing the undoing sometimes of things.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:47] Yeah, it can be so powerful. You know, one of the other themes that really weaves so much through the stories and the invitations is relationships, is the notion of, I mean, your family clearly is central, and I think it is for so many people friends, chosen friends, chosen family. And, you know, there’s a really interesting story that you shared that I loved. That was just for some reason, it was really moving to me, the story of Leonard. Um, and I think maybe again, because it’s a long time, like in the New York City, like if you open your eyes for a heartbeat, there are people all around your neighborhood who are invisible to most, but they’re human beings, and you can create relationships with them that are fun and joyful. They’re light, but they’re like they add these little moments of microjoys. Share a bit of the story around Leonard because I just thought it was. I was smiling the whole time I was reading it.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:49:40] Oh, I’m so glad you brought Leonard up. I was living in Fort Greene at the time, and Leonard was experiencing homelessness in the city and had been for quite a long time. He was always on my street. Always. And I’ll let you read the book to get the full essay and how and why he was there. But over the course of five years, we really built this fellowship, this relationship with one another. He struggled with mental illness. And so there were like, every time I would meet Leonard, it was almost like meeting him again. And we would have this conversation again. It was like, I’m Cindy, I live here. And he’d say, I’m Leonard, and this is how I got to be here. And over this five year period of time, I would see him day in and day out. And he became such a part of my life that when IRA and I. When IRA moved in with me in Fort Greene, I remember introducing my husband to Leonard. He was this staple in the neighborhood, and I would sit with him for ten minutes, 15 minutes and have conversations. And even though he may not remember all of the details of the conversation every time, he certainly remembered me. And I remember this one incident where I was running to the subway. It was raining and I was underneath the scaffolding. And Leonard. I yelled to him, I said, hey Leonard, stop smoking. You know it’s the smoking’s going to kill you. There’s something really passive. As I was going to the subway and he said, hey, you doing all right? And he was smiling that same smile that he always had. He said, you need some money.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:51:06] And it was one of those beautiful moments that caused me to stop where I was in the middle of hurrying on a rainy day in New York City, and look at Leonard and actually stop and have a conversation. And those were the sort of moments that Leonard and I would experience for five years. And I remember as we were moving out of the neighborhood, I let him know where we were moving to which neighborhood. And I said, you know, I hope we get to see you again. I hope I get to see you again. Two years later, sitting on a bench and in between my old neighborhood and my present neighborhood was Leonard. And I was so happy, like, overjoyed to see him. And I thought, he’s not going to remember me. But I yelled out his name and he looked at me and he said, hey, it’s you. How’s Brooklyn Heights treating you? So for all of this time that I thought Leonard didn’t really remember much about me, here we were years later and he did remember. And that is life, right? There are so many folks that are in the background of our lives that if we took the time to get to know, we would appreciate in such beautiful ways. Leonard I’d never seen him have a conversation with anyone, not ever. And it never occurred to me not to have a conversation with. I mean, if you see a person walking around your neighborhood all the time, it’s just occurred. You know, it’s the nice thing to do. But yes, it was that that relationship or fellowship with Leonard that we often have with folks, and we just keep passing them by.
Jonathan Fields: [00:52:35] Yeah, and it’s interesting because so often I think as adults, we struggle to make friends or we struggle to create new relationships. And we and we think it’s only worth it if it’s going to turn into a deep, meaningful, long-term friendship. And that that’s amazing when that happens. I mean, you and I are a great example, like we’re adult friends, but all of these moments throughout the day where you can just start an interaction with a human being that may become this ongoing thing, you know, that has this like just tiny little dose of like a smile to your day. Like, I remember the first time we don’t live in New York anymore. But there’s one place where I often get lunch. I remember the first time I walked in there and she’s like, Jonathan, right, here’s your salad. Uh, you know, it’s like little things like that where, like, you’re actually people are starting to know who each other are. Yeah, that makes a difference. So yes, like, deep friendships are amazing. They’re also they’re not the easiest to to find and make and cultivate later in life. But there are so many opportunities just to create these almost like ambient relationships. As you move through the day, they each add a little bit of a hit of something joyful. I want to also, there’s a word that you introduced that I’d never heard before, and that was freudeenfreude. I think a lot of people have heard the term schadenfreude, you know, which is sort of like wishing ill of others.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:53:56] Not wishing it, but kind of not.
Jonathan Fields: [00:53:58] Yeah. You know, or reveling in the demise of others. Um, you introduce sort of like the opposite term, which I’d never heard before. And I thought it was really cool because in those moments where we’re struggling, we’re really finding hard, a hard time figuring out how do we access joy through the circumstances of our own lives. It’s like a gateway to be able to experience that through the joy of others.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:54:23] Yeah, it’s borrowing someone’s joy. So bread. Who is a woman in dear Grown-ass woman? She actually introduced this term to me. And it’s Freud and Freud, I think, and it is the opposite of schadenfreude. So it is feeling joy for the joy of others, and it’s really allowing ourselves to be in those moments when people are experiencing beauty. One of the things that comes to mind for me first is seeing someone in a public place get engaged. You’re at a game, you’re in the middle of Times Square, you’re in the mall. I don’t know where people do this, but we always see these videos online. You know, someone falls to a knee perhaps, or just turns over and the camera pans to them and you see them getting, you know, getting engaged. And hopefully the other person says, yes. And the entire audience breaks out into applause. That is the ultimate frightened curator, right? Like we are in it with you at that time. Our heart is swelling for you. There’s not a differentiation between my joy in that moment and In yours. We are all in this together. We are all allowing ourselves to feel joy at the joy of someone else. You know, your best friend calls you and announces that at 45, she’s pregnant and she didn’t want to have kids before. But she did for the last few years and you were over the moon for them. But there are so many moments that we have where someone shares their excitement with us and we simply accept it and move on. And the idea to me, with Freud and Freud is again, in these moments when times are difficult, borrow someone else’s joy, borrow someone else’s. If you can’t find it in your own well, that’s okay. That’s temporary. But borrow someone else’s and allow yourself to feel joy for the joy of others. I also loved that word when when Red told me about it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:56:16] Yeah, I love it too. And it was interesting because the other thing, as as I was thinking about it and reading about it, was there’s a Yiddish word that popped into my head naches. Yes. You know, which translates roughly to, you know, the joy you feel for someone who you hold so dearly and closely that you experience their joy, their success as your own. And freudeenfreude seems to just expand that out to like what you might actually be able to feel a lot of this from anybody, you know, if you’re really paying attention. And as I was reading that and thinking about it, I was remembering literally an afternoon in the middle of the pandemic when I was sitting on my couch and I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. And it kept serving me videos about sort of like random acts of kindness from strangers. And I’m just sitting there like I could. If somebody had asked me to say a word, I wouldn’t have been able to speak because there was a lump in my throat. I was so moved, I didn’t know these people. I will never know these people. And yet simply witnessing something like an experience of generosity and kindness just deeply moved me. And I was like, I’m like, how many other ways are there for us to actually feel the way we want to feel? Yeah, if we’re really struggling to access it through the immediate circumstances of our lives, think more broadly. To me, this was an invitation to say like like using your language, like, how can I borrow it, even just for a moment until maybe I can start to access it again myself?
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:57:40] And you just gave the perfect accessible tool to do it, which is social media and YouTube follow a few happiness accounts and that is all that will get served up. I follow cat accounts because I’m a creep in that way, but I have to tell you, it brings me hours of joy when I see kittens and cats. But that’s it’s the stuff that sounds so silly, but really, it offers us moments to smile even in the midst of the hardest times. And we need that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:06] Yeah, and I think that is a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I have asked you this question, but it was a while ago, so I’m going to ask it again, as I do at the end of every conversation. And this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:58:23] To live a good life means allowing yourself to be quiet when you need to, and joyful and loud and over the top when you want to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:33] Thank you.
Cyndie Spiegel: [00:58:34] Thank you.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:37] Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Ocean Vuong about navigating struggle and making peace with your story. You’ll find a link to Ocean’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.