Find Your Joy.

It might be the most important thing you do.

By Shalise Manza Young

New years represent new hope for many, but any hope that this might be a better year for the United States on the global stage ended less than 72 hours into 2026, when a strike on Venezuela resulted in the deaths of about 75 civilians and the kidnapping of the country’s president and first lady.

If you’re an American who pays any attention to what’s happening here, there’s not a lot of joy in the headlines. Job losses are up, grocery prices are up, health insurance costs are up, the number of masked thugs assaulting—and now killing—our neighbors is up, the level of embarrassment citizens feel watching Drowsy Donald mumble through media appearances is up.

Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash

And morale among the populace writ large is down.

If you’ve read me a couple of times, you know I’m not pollyannaish. But I’ve come to realize that amid all this, the best thing we can do is make our own joy and find hope in our day-to-day lives. It’s one of the few things that can sustain us right now.

Sometimes joy comes from the small things. Driving my younger daughters to school one day in the fall, we noticed a white dog sitting at the glass storm door of a family’s townhouse, watching the traffic pass by on the busy street.

Almost every day since, our trip includes one of the two asking, “Will the doggie be there?,” and a slight slowdown as we approach the slate-blue home. Even as the morning temperatures settled into the low 20s here in Boston, the heavy door meant to keep the cold out is usually open, and the doggie is there at the glass, living its best life.

We celebrate when we see the dog and return to singing whatever it is they’re into that week, whether “Epic the Musical,” “Hamilton,” Laufey, or Katseye, for the final few minutes of the ride.

One of the places I find hope is with the track students I coach. Finding track as a teenager had a profound impact on me, and when I came across a listing a little more than 15 years ago for a team in need of a coach for hurdles and high jump, my best events as a competitor, I applied and was hired.

I was mostly self-taught in those events in high school, so figuring out how to coach them was a process. But, after a few years, I realized that for as much as I’ve enjoyed being a journalist and all of the places it has taken me, coaching is where I am meant to be. I can love on my kids first and foremost, supporting and encouraging them–not just through practices and meets but also through whatever else is happening in their lives.

Sports generally can teach us many lessons, but track and field is one of the few where you can see in black and white that you are improving.

This past fall, I changed schools, hired as director of the track program at a different independent school. Both schools are academically rigorous, which, of course, can cause a lot of anxiety and stress for high-schoolers.

But I can promise my athletes that if they come to practice every day and put in the work, they will see their times getting faster and their jumps higher or farther. They may be frustrated trying to appease their history teacher, but they can control their outcomes in track.

Seeing them respond to instruction, watching as they start putting together the details that can take them from an average athlete to a championship-contending one, hearing them cheer each other on as they push through hard workouts is joy for me.

Their faces when they realize they’ve set a new personal record in an event—or PR, in track parlance—have led to my eyes filling with happy tears more times than I can count. Going around a small circle and asking them to share a rose, thorn, and bud—a good thing that happened recently, not-so-great thing that happened, and something they’re looking forward to—gives me a small window into their achievements and worries away from the team.

And now, since my new team has both an indoor and an outdoor track and our current team is over 130 kids, I get to experience all of that even more. For the two hours of practice or five-plus of a meet, I am focused on them.

All of that is to say: Even if it means for one moment or one hour or one day, you can focused on something other than the newest racist, sexist, nonsensical, violent move made by members of this WEI (white, entitled, and incompetent—we can thank the wonderful Lurie Daniel Favors for the entirely accurate acronym) regime, it’ll be worth it. The fear and anger will return when you re-open your social media platform of choice.

Friends, look for hope. Find joy. Let them nourish your spirit and sustain you.

You can’t fight when you’re exhausted, and there’s a vicious fight in front of us.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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