I usually listen to a podcast episode or a few minutes of an audiobook at the start of my workouts to distract my brain from thinking about how much I do not want to be working out at that moment. Then, when I’m about halfway through exercising and my body loosens up, I switch to a playlist with a few bangers from my high school and college years. Nothing gets this almost 40-year-old mama’s feet moving a little faster than hits from the 90s and early aughts.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I went to see a play based on C.S. Lewis's (very trippy and often confusing but still profound) book, The Great Divorce. The script and the acting brought truths to light in a way I can easily miss while reading the book.

At one point, I had to pull out my phone to type out this line so I could hold onto it and ruminate over it a little longer:

“Either joy prevails or misery infects it.”

I've been turning that phrase over in my mind for the last week, and I looked up the full quote in Lewis's book. Here, the narrator's guide is leading the narrator around the outskirts of a sort of celestial space and explaining the meaning of what they're seeing. The guide says:

“Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”

There's so much to dig into there, and so much in the context of the book that's worth reading. But here's the simple truth I want us to hold onto: Joy will prevail.