I think we need to be cautious here. In my long life I’ve experienced tragedy, catastrophe, panic and misery, and it has not been my experience that joy is impervious to such grievous adversity. Surely joy, like happiness, may depend on external circumstances, and to suggest otherwise feels to me like a Pollyanna approach. Looking at the quotation from Ari Honarvar, I cannot imagine that the radical resistance of Afghans against Taliban oppression encompasses joyful living. Sometimes ‘Saying Yes to Life’ means clinging to life at all costs, an act of consummate courage. Joy is a wonderful state of mind when we experience it, and we’re richly blessed if we cultivate it whenever we can, yet there are times in life when it may completely elude us.

As a superannuated septuagenarian I’m blessed to be able to walk for about five miles in the countryside on our doorstep every morning after breakfast. While walking I say silently to myself ‘eyes of wonder’ whenever I need reminding to gaze in awe at the beauty of nature. My walks are essential for my spiritual, mental and physical health, and I’m fond of a pearl of wisdom written by a distinguished British author nearly a century ago. In 1928 George Macaulay Trevelyan, founding president of the Youth Hostels Association in England and Wales, wrote an essay acclaiming the joys of walking which began with these unforgettable words: ‘I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.’

Birdsong escapes me because of the severity of my hearing loss, but my joy in watching birds has been richly enhanced by Claire Thompson’s glorious book The Art of Mindful Birdwatching, which is especially good for those of us with little skill at bird identification. Published in the UK in 2017, this book is widely available internationally. And on the subject of books, I have just bought Fabiana’s Where Wonder Lives: Practices for Cultivating the Sacred in Your Daily Life, so a banquet of delights now awaits me.

As a young boy I discovered my sense of wonder when gazing at pinprick stars peeping through a night sky, bringing my first glimpses of infinity. Wonder comes naturally to children and, if I found myself awake in the night, I often tiptoed out of bed to see if stars were waiting for me outside my window. For most of my adult life I neglected my sense of wonder but now, in my vintage years, it’s the most precious of all my senses. More than 60 years after my earliest childhood glimpses of twinkling skies I’ve joyfully returned to the night-time practice of tiptoeing out of bed in search of starlight. Astronomers say there are more stars in our solar system than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.

Clouds are surely our most abundant source of unnoticed beauty, because all we have to do is look up. Nothing in nature is more mysterious than clouds and, to my eyes, nothing is more beautiful and full of wonder. Their once-in-a-lifetime poetic beauty will never be repeated no matter how often we look skywards again, and their endowment of rain is a bounteous gift without which most Earthly life would eventually perish. Why do clouds not sink to Earth? A cumulus cloud can carry 500 tonnes of water – the weight of 40 double-decker buses – yet it appears to us as a castle sailing majestically across the sky.

Kristi’s mantra ‘There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to know’, which introduces the reading Deepening Our Comfort with Uncertainty, is a priceless gift to me at this moment. On New Year’s Day, after much preparation and clearing of decks, I begin a ‘gap year’ in my eighth decade in which my mission is to explore the transformative practice of grateful living as a way of life.

I am already clear that the practice of seeking reasons to be grateful in each moment of every day will require me to live much closer to the present moment. This calls for nothing less than a radical change in my habits, the invisible architecture of everyday life. I have always been a compulsive organiser, striving to micro-manage everything in sight, yet in my new adventure my heart’s desire is to abandon plans, expectations and goals, trusting instead that all I need will be given to me.

‘There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to know’ will now underpin my way of living in the year ahead and, with profound gratefulness for the right words at the right time, I take Kristi’s mantra as my own.

Kristi’s mantra ‘There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to know’, which introduces the reading Deepening Our Comfort with Uncertainty, is a priceless gift to me at this moment. On New Year’s Day, after much preparation and clearing of decks, I begin a ‘gap year’ in my eighth decade in which my mission is to explore the transformative practice of grateful living as a way of life.

I am already clear that the practice of seeking reasons to be grateful in each moment of every day will require me to live much closer to the present moment. This calls for nothing less than a radical change in my habits, the invisible architecture of everyday life. I have always been a compulsive organiser, striving to micro-manage everything in sight, yet in my new adventure my heart’s desire is to abandon plans, expectations and goals, trusting instead that all I need will be given to me.

‘There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to know’ will now underpin my way of living in the year ahead and, with profound gratefulness for the right words at the right time, I take Kristi’s mantra as my own.

Thank you so much, Sue, for taking time to reply so helpfully. I’m deeply grateful for your words from Psalm 50 which uplift me. Sometimes the morning may take a very long time to come, yet in my experience dawn eventually follows night. I’ve learned to be wary of sugar-coated responses to harrowing adversity, and at the top of my list is the most frequently quoted sentence from the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, ‘All shall be well’, which does us no favours when glibly repeated. In my understanding of this maxim, Julian is not offering a soothing balm assuring us that everything will turn out all right in the end or that the disturbances in our lives are simply trivial. Instead I take her words as a promise that, whatever suffering comes our way, God holds us in love and God’s ultimate purpose in creation will never be defeated.

Thank you, Fabiana. After reading your Introduction I went straight to The Mountaintop – which seemed a good place for a septuagenarian to start! – and I am thrilled with what I find there. The exercises for learning to tell a bigger story are tailor-made for me, and the first two acts of the Journey define with uncanny accuracy what has been happening in my life over the past three years. So now I am inspired by you to embrace the third act. Entering this territory feels like a quantum leap in understanding myself: ‘Once we know that a greater life awaits us, we must walk resolutely in the direction of that challenge.’ I am abundantly grateful to you.