This is adapted from MEA alum Steven Petrow’s latest book, The Joy You Make: Find The Silver Linings—Even On Your Darkest Day, to be published by The Open Field, Maria Shriver’s personally-curated imprint, at Penguin Random House. The superb book features so many different ways to feel joy, an emotion that led me to naming my first company, Joie de Vivre. I will be in conversation with Steven on September 16 with MEA alum Corazon members.
One of my favorite social scientists today is Jamil Zaki, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and author of The War for Kindness. He’s written that “fiction is empathy’s gateway drug. It helps us feel for others when real-world caring is too difficult, complicated, or painful.”
In reading Zaki’s book, I took note when he explained how “readers can empathize safely even with outsiders they would disavow or avoid in public.” More importantly, he says, this kind of interaction on the page can “pave the way for caring about real outsiders.” Or, as Joyce Carol Oates once noted, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”
Meanwhile, numerous researchers have concluded that reading fiction is associated with the development of empathy in both adults and children, providing a scientific underpinning to the important link between the empathy felt for fictional characters (say, Hester Prynne, a woman who scandalously child out of wedlock in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts) and the ability to empathize with real people.
Why is this important in seeking joy? Well, empathy, it’s been noted often, is a fundamental building block to experiencing joy. In fact, there’s even a science of empathetic joy (sometimes referred to as sympathetic joy). A common example is the joy a parent experiences when watching their child succeed at school, make new friends, or learn to ride a bicycle.
For me, when I was in my teens, I delighted in the new worlds and new friends opening up to me thanks to my eleventh grade English teacher, Charles Neumeier, who had us read everyone from Milton, Moliere to Melville with Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau thrown in. I can see now that he taught us to experience the joy of inhabiting someone else’s skin, or what we think of as empathy.
I unearthed other joys of reading along the way. From time to time, Mr. Neumeier read aloud to us—dramatic readings, always, but I also think he wanted us to get out of our heads, to ensure that we didn’t simply become silent, solitary readers. I’d have called myself an introvert in high school, so I struggled when called upon to read a passage aloud to the rest of the class. I can’t know how much Mr. Neumeier might have intuited the body of research to come, which we now understand suggests that reading aloud helps improve our memories and boosts our comprehension of complicated texts.
Even more important, it strengthens emotional bonds between people. That year, both as listener and reader, I experienced how the classroom held us together. It was as though we were one body, not thirty-five separate cells (yes, we had large classes in the New York City public schools), as though we all belonged to each other.
A growing body of research is finding that reading aloud brings joy, comfort, yes, that very sense of community. I’ve continued to read aloud to others throughout my lifetime.
My former partner, Barry, and I loved to end the day in bed, book in hand, as we read to each other before falling asleep in each other’s arms. When my mother was ill and no longer able to read, I’d sit by her bedside and read aloud to her, taking my time. Sam Duncan, an adult literacy researcher in the U.K., told the BBC that “when someone is reading aloud to you, you feel a bit like you’re given a gift of their time, of their attention, of their voice.”
We know this with kids; I mean who doesn’t love reading to their children, or to their nieces and nephews, and witnessing the connection or bonding that occurs? We don’t do this nearly as much with the adults in our lives. If we did, I wonder whether we might not solve one of our thorniest problems today – the isolation, loneliness and polarization pervading families, communities and the country.
-Steven
Steven Petrow is an award-winning journalist and author who is best known for his Washington Post and New York Times essays on aging, health, and civility. Steven is the author of six previous books, including the bestselling Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old, and his TED Talk, “3 Ways to Practice Civility,” has garnered nearly two million views. His new book, The Joy You Make, will be published in September.