Dr. Arthur Brooks describes finding his deepest joy through alignment with his mission to lift people up using science and ideas. Prayer and spiritual exercises helped him discern this path, and his marriage has improved as a result. He acknowledges aging and health challenges ahead but says alignment with his heart is his present source of joy.
What is the thing that's bringing you the most joy? Yeah, what's bringing me the most joy right now is the fact that I am living up to my own personal mission. My mission is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. It took me a while to get here, and I thought about it, and I prayed an awful lot. I said, lord, show me my path. I mean, we always pray this, but we rarely mean it because he's gonna. And it can be pretty jarring when he does. But I prayed that, and I went through a whole series of exerc. Spiritual exercises about how I could really discern this. And I feel like for the very first time in my life, I'm doing what I really need to be doing. And the result of that is that I'm in alignment with the other parts of my life as well. My marriage is better than it's ever been. I mean, and again, I mean, there's tough times coming. I mean, I'm not getting any younger, and we're all going to have health challenges going forward, and I'm going to have to make decisions about how much stuff I can actually do, and that's going to be hard, to be sure. But the source of joy in my life is the alignment between what I'm doing and what's written on my heart for the first time.
