Exercising Delight

In which my workout gets a much needed upgrade.

Vee and I at the moment CNN called the election for Joe Biden

“But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this…lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

— Excerpt from This is Water by David Foster Wallace, a commencement address to the Kenyon College Class of 2005, worth reading in its entirety.

We used to live in a hidden world.

We used to live in a world where you could pass by a shopper in the grocery store without seeing their soul. 

That world is gone, for now, and I hate it.

I live in a part of the country where mask mandates have been in effect for much of the past two years, and for good reason. We are a large county just outside a large city, and COVID rates have been extremely high here at times, although thankfully we also have very high vaccination rates.

What this means is that for much of the pandemic, every time I have gone into a store, I have been confronted with clear evidence of each shopper’s morality, as plain as the nose on their face. Literally. If their mask is worn as a chin sling, or - worse yet - if they are proudly flaunting the fact that they are not wearing a mask at all, it is an instant sign that they are rotten to the core. And this is truly information I wish I did not know.

Back in the hidden world, I could try (and often fail, but at least try) to assume the best about people I did not know. If someone was being obnoxious - speaking rudely to a serviceperson or pitching a fit about some minor inconvenience, for example - it was possible to imagine that maybe they were actually a good person, that maybe, as the David Foster Wallace quote above illustrates, they were decent-but-stressed, pushed by some impossible stressor to the point of awfulness. (And who among us hasn’t been there at least once?)

But that is all gone now. Because if you are the kind of person who makes a conscious choice not to briefly and minorly inconvenience yourself in order to maybe keep from killing someone, then that is the alpha and the omega of what I need to know about your decency. 

But I do not want to spend all of my time in the negative. Consider instead this exchange between Krista Tippett, the host of NPR’s On Being, and the poet-gardener-philosopher Ross Gay, about his book of essays, The Book of Delights, which is wonderful and marvelous and which you should run out and buy immediately (and deepest, eternal thanks to the one who first introduced me to Gay’s work).

Gay: Many things surprised me, I suppose. But one of the things that surprised me was how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident. That was really quick. [laughs] And I wasn’t sure; I was a little bit like, “This is gonna be hard, to just have something delightful happen every day.”

Tippett:You said somewhere that you developed a delight radar or a delight muscle. Well, it seems to me it’s kind of the inverse, or the opposite experience from going to the therapist every week, where you’re saving up things [laughs] that illustrate your neurosis. And you were doing the opposite.

Gay: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s fun. It was fun.

Tippett: But what are some of the things that you noticed that you found delightful and called “delight” that you wouldn’t have imagined before you started?

Gay: You know. It just occurred to me — it made me realize how often I am delighted, how often things happen that — like you were doing this hand gesture, and you were doing these hand gestures. I was like, “I love hand gestures,” when you were doing that. I do them too, with abundance.

I realized, over the course of writing the book, how much I love — I have a title of one of the pieces in there, but it’s like — how do I say it? “Physical contact that is pleasant, unambiguously pleasant” — “public physical interactions,” I think is what I call it. I love how frequently I’m in the presence of sweet little interactions that don’t have to happen, but do have to happen.

Tippett: I guess some that I noticed — just these ordinary things, like seeing two people sharing the burden of carrying a shopping bag or a sack of laundry, how they are helping each other and how their bodies are adjusting to each other.

Gay: It’s pretty amazing. It’s an amazing thing. But it’s not, until you say it’s amazing.

“Whoa, it’s amazing. We do that all the time.”

Tippett: I think sometimes about this phrase, “made my day” — that we have the power, with our words and with all kinds of small gestures like that. Even somebody being really nice in a checkout line, or you being nice to somebody in a checkout line, after the last two people were really rude to them. And you watch a transformation take place that you made — that their day was getting broken, and you made. What an incredible power we have, to walk through the world, making somebody’s day.

Gay: Just in a soft way. It’s kind of amazing.

The hard part, of course, is the reconciling of the first part with the second part of this essay. How do I seek delight, how do I orient back towards making someone’s day, when my soul feels all gnarled and worn from two years of being constantly reminded that the world is full of selfish, thoughtless, ignorant, morally bankrupt people? I go out in the world, I witness the heart-crushing spectacle of the anti-maskers, the lazy non-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, all wreaking their havoc on the communities that surround them . . . where is delight in this experience? (It doesn’t help either that I’ve been immersed in these issues at work as well, as a function of my job.) That muscle feels so atrophied, where once it felt like something I had the option to flex.

The answer, of course, is what the answer always is: Try. Harder. 

For one thing, the criminally underpaid, extraordinary, exhausted-yet-seemingly-inexhaustible teachers who have filled my girls’ hard days with bubbling joy and laughter and creativity and love since March of 2020? Every teacher. Every year. (You try getting a snarky tween to think you walk on water. And yet all of Vee’s teachers - all of them! - appear that way to her.) 

For another thing, the criminally underpaid, extraordinary, exhausted-yet-seemingly- inexhaustible home health care aides who have carried my father through his aching, mostly isolated life these past two years. Not every one, but enough to keep him alive, because they love him and they know to hold his vulnerability in their soft hands, gently.

For a third thing (it’s flowing now), my ex-husband, who has thrown his all into providing a safe place for our girls to be in the midst of so many traumas, who has worked - on his own, and with me - to give them everything good he can give, who is always striving, who never rests on his laurels. Delight! 

Oh! And for a fourth thing (now I’m just straining construction, but why not), every single exceptional human I wrote about here, each of whom reminds me that the world is full of exceptional humans, and that for every unmasked twit in the grocery store, there are twenty or thirty or more pairs of eyes smiling over a mask, souls twinkling, seeding delight. 

Do you see? How with just a few minutes of work my delight muscle started to twitch and return to life? Which is of course Gay’s point. And Tippett’s too, because while the interview first aired in June of 2019, she brilliantly re-aired it on March 26, 2020. She must have sensed that the work of seeking delight would be work desperately needed in the weeks (months! years!) ahead. And she was right. 

So my advice to you today is this (especially if someone recently has triggered your outrage muscle): Read Ross Gay. Practice delight. Observe Beauty. And the gifts will flow…