Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Miriam Webster defines flounder in the

following way. To struggle to move or obtain footing. Thrash about wildly. I am a grade A flounderer. I have spent a

great deal of my life thrashing about wildly, not quite sure where I was going or what I was meant to be

doing or who I wanted to be. To thrash about for the purpose of obtaining footing implies that there exists

some elusive state of stability we simply haven't achieved yet. In my experience, the whole nature

of floundering is that you're not quite sure what the state of shore footing is. You just know you

haven't reached it yet. So you thrash about wildly, hoping to God that you are thrashing in the right

direction, painfully aware that all your energy may be for naught, which ties in nicely with the

second definition of flounder, to proceed or act clumsily or ineffectually. Sound familiar? Am I the only one?

Hello everybody and welcome back to this aggressively happy podcast series.

We are working our way through the themes of my new book, Aggressively Happy,

a realist guide to believing in the goodness of life.

And last week we explored the theme of befriending sadness, what it looks like

to make space for good grief in our lives, that we're not turning ourselves into stone, or not

allowing ourselves to feel the real vulnerability that comes with being a human. And this week we

turn to one of my favorite chapters in the book,

which is Flounder Well. And this is a chapter about what to do when you have no idea what to do.

And when you have no idea where you're going. Later this week, I'm going to release an interview

with George Corbett, who is a lecturer at St. Andrews University and who studies Dante.

And I love the way that Dante opens his great masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.

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