Counterweights
An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World
by Shannan Martin
Revell, 2026. 238 pages.
Review written July 8, 2026, from my own book, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review
Over several years since it was my Sonderbooks Stand-out in 2016, I’ve gone through the book Champagne for the Soul with two of my small groups (as well as on my own) – and both times it set our group spotting joys, looking for things to be joyful about in daily life.
But sometimes I feel a bit guilty looking for joys when there’s so much trouble in the world. When people are being oppressed and injustice is rampant, is it right to take pleasure in a sighting of a great blue heron?
This book fully acknowledges the weight of the world. And Shannan Martin frames finding joys as looking for counterweights.
She begins with a metaphor that she learned as a child that it’s easier to carry heavy weights if you have one bucket on each side.
Abundance isn’t experienced by merely counting our blessings but by countering our weights.
The essays that follow are a collection of some of the weights and counterweights I’ve faced, mostly over a few years’ time, which I believe deserve our sacred attention. Some of my hardships have been uniquely personal, while others have tied all of us in knots. Others have been secondary: the contact burns of paying attention to a world where, most often, trauma lands hardest on those who are already vulnerable. These weights range from mundane to dizzyingly dramatic. But at every turn, goodness has waited for me to take notice and scoop it up, leveling the load of life’s endless dualities.
I love the way this doesn’t dismiss or minimize the weights, but shows that the weights make the counterweights all the more necessary.
This is not a “silver lining” situation, where pain and injustice are minimized for the sake of flimsy optimism or playing nice. It’s not even about hoarding our favorite things. We are not guaranteed to have those things within our reach. The practice of gathering counterweights is about creating moments of sustenance from the raw materials of what we’re given. It is about holding everything in honest tension. Both/and. Our counterweights help us move forward and breathe through the heaviness. At their best, they can’t be bought or sold. They aren’t a matter of luck or reserved for the privileged. They are widely accessible and casually weird, entirely personal and communal to their core. They are their own reward. And they are happening all the time, ready to steady us on our feet.
So that’s what you’ve got in this book – stories of weighty matters, but also counterweights, things that bring joy. And it’s a lovely model for dealing with our own weights.
After all:
Counterweights are everywhere. But it’s up to us to slow down and see them.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/counterweights.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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