How delight helped save my life

I’ve been reading Ross Gay’s Book of Delights the past couple months — he spent a year writing an “essaylette” a day on the subject. Which kind of pisses me off, actually, in the way that art can make you mad when it’s so good or when it manages to articulate something you’ve been dribbling and stuttering out of your mouth for years. Like, of course: delight. Excuse me, then, as I riff on his turf a bit. We should all pay attention to the matter of gathering great handfuls of delight. We should all aim for our human quota, which is sort of infinite despite our definite finite status. Because delight can save your life. I think it did mine.

In an interview with Krista Tippett on the podcast On Being, Gay says that he traffics in delight because it’s just how he does: “To some extent, I feel like I’ve always loved the smell of honey suckle. I feel like I could love stuff, really love stuff.” She asks for examples, and it’s so sweet, what he says. He says he loves Tippet’s hand gestures — loves hand gestures generally, and seeing hers makes him remember that. He says the way the light is playing out above him is pretty great. He says he finds himself propelled by a question: “What do you love? What do you love?”

Which automatically takes me back to my friend Sallie’s van idling in my driveway over a year and a half ago. It was cold out, and she kept the engine running so we could have the heat. We’d gone out to the movies that night, both mesmerized by the liquid color and undulating paint of Loving Vincent. She drove me home since I’d walked to the theater — walking everywhere is kind of my thing. We were sitting there in a thick silence, because the movie, in addition to breaking artistic ground, also charted Van Gogh’s last days to try to answer the question of whether or not Van Gogh killed himself. Because my friend Logan had just told Sallie that, perhaps like Van Gogh, I didn’t much want to live anymore, either.

She said a number of the right things that night, which is kind of how she does. She asked me questions, told me she loved me, gave me lots of options, including a place to stay if I needed it. And then, because Sallie is a magical being attuned to something more than, she turned toward me in the car and here’s where Gay’s delight joined us along with the noise of the idling engine. It wasn’t a question she asked, it was more a statement, a counterargument she raised to challenge mine. She turned to me and said, confidently, “You still love things.”

And what could I do? I couldn’t lie. I responded automatically, like I walk around primed to answer that question. It came out confident, if a bit tired and worn and sore. I said, “I do.”

I used to have this habit, every six months or a year, of listing all the things I loved. The sound and smell of leaves crunching in the fall. Walking in the rain. The warm, languorous fatigue that takes you after swimming in the sun. Long lists, dozens of entries, as many as I could think of. I would make them when I was about to start something new: a relationship, a project, moving to a new apartment. It was a project of discovery — who was I now?

Some things carried over from list to list — that corn flake quality of fall leaves for example — but other things changed over the years. Once my nieces were born, lists formerly dominated by individual delights soon felt the influence of babies: the heavy weight of a child falling asleep on my chest. The way Naomi, my oldest niece, would point to something as a way to demand more information. She’d say, “This.”

I loved these lists of loves. They were a way of locating and confirming a new and developing version of myself. Life found and recorded as a collection of little moments. We brush up against something — something sort of ineffable, something definitely ephemeral. Something you want to cup in your hands and run up to someone, showing them. You hold it in your hands. You hold it up to them. You say, “This.” It’s all there, all the time, arrayed at our feet like jewels.

I knew I was in trouble last fall and winter when I couldn’t even start a list. I’d ended a brief but hurtful relationship that had cost me time, self-respect, and, worst of all, several friendships. Other friends had moved away, whether geographically or because they’d disappeared into the dark corners of addiction. I wasn’t entirely innocent in any of it — I’d been acting selfishly and without care for the people I loved. I felt guilty and ashamed. I had recently been diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses that completely changed how I slept and ate and moved. I didn’t know what to eat anymore. Nothing seemed to soothe the fire in my belly or the fog in my mind.

And then there was what was going on outside my purview: Trump was elected. Smoke from historically-fierce forest fires filled the valley where I lived. Racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate seem to be running our government unchecked: “there were very fine people on both sides.” It all felt like it was closing in.

A friend, Jenai, told me once that when she was going through the worst of her divorce, she was suddenly unable to read. She loved books more than anything, but she kept putting them down after only a few pages. When I asked her why, she told me that she couldn’t bear to enter a story where someone was changing things, going on quests, and having adventures, when she felt so stuck and so sure that she always would be. To touch the thing she didn’t feel she would have again was unbearable. She lost her love, it felt like, in all respects.

I think I know what she meant. I had trouble finding delight in anything — what was the point? I would open to a new page of my journal, write the number “1” at the top, and stare. If I have a superpower, I think it might be the private collection of such delights, and to not be able to find them? I felt like I’d gone missing. The question, normally exciting at the start of a list (who was I now?) took on darker tones. If I couldn’t do this, if I didn’t love anything, if I didn’t think I’d be able to do that again — was I anyone at all?

And yet, I showed up in that car that night. Sallie was essentially asking, you’re still you in there, you still see all this, right? And I responded, like Molly Bloom at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, unhappy and guilty and yet full of pleasure and memory and song, reaching back to a beautiful moment of her own delight, just full of “yes I said yes I will yes.”

In that moment, she had me. Because see here: that fact about me? That I still love things? Once I really felt my way into the ready answer I gave, to its immediacy and its truth, to how way down wherever I really live that answer can be found, always, I had reupped my contract with life. Signed a new lease. I still loved things, and I mean loved them like I would fight you to keep them safe, like I would fight whoever says that there’s nothing new under the sun. I see you when you’re rocking out in your car, and I love it; I want to bend down and worship every goddamn weed pushing its way up through concrete; for every cliché, every unexpected little vignette, I am just here. Which is to say…yeah: I’m still here. I still have work to do, and the joy helps me attend to that work. It’s like Candide says after he’s fought his way to the castle at the center of the labyrinth and discovered not much more than endless amounts of suffering and hypocrisy and humanness: “We must grow our garden.” We must take up the work of fostering nutritive, earthly delights.

Because they just keep showing up, those little bastards.

I’m really worried that you might think I’m saying Sallie’s question fixed everything. It didn’t. I didn’t go back to my room that night and fill my journal with delights. I tossed and turned through nights for months (still do sometimes). I kept fucking things up and burning out and showing up in my life all weird and kinda tortured and awkward and wounded. It took me another year and change before I started feeling able to notice again. Before I could start to read and think and write again. It took time.

I’m worried that you think I’m saying delight offers an easy answer to depression, to what’s going wrong in our lives, to the four-alarm fire of our planet. That it’s an easy answer to systemic racism, patriarchy, and how cruelty seems to be the point these days.

I’m not. I don’t mean in any way to suggest ease. I actually think it’s really hard work to love things right now. To pay attention to the small child tugging on our pant legs, pointing to the fat, puddle-hungry green caterpillar ambling its way across the sidewalk. In the face of a world on fire? To look down, to pause, to gather it up in your cupped hands, coo over it, and guide it to whatever safety the other side of the sidewalk offers these days? It’s really hard to listen to that part of ourselves. To insist on it. To say, in the face of it all, “This.” To cultivate hope in the dark.

Ross Gay also acknowledges that labor — argues, even, that delight is intimately connected with death: “And to me … joy has everything to do with the fact that we’re all going to die. That’s actually — when I’m thinking about joy, I’m thinking about that at the same time as something wonderful is happening, some connection is being made in my life, we are also in the process of dying. That is every moment. That is every moment.” It all matters, the wonder and the dying. All of it.

Another question he asks: “How joy?” How, in this moment that seems to be always slipping away from us? How, when it all seems to be closing in?

No answers from this girl. It’s just that the question made me start to remember that it was all still there. Like David Whyte’s poem, written in grief: “Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone … Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation.” I could start to look for myself in my delight again, which is really to say that I could start to reach beyond myself, finally. To say that I could reach for you, too.

I keep trying to focus on Gay’s question as a kind of life practice: “How joy?” Because in that work, the moments do build up. They add up to something. I don’t know what exactly, and it doesn’t fix anything. It’s actually quite hard to stand sometimes. It’s also a privilege to have the space and time to see and acknowledge it. But it’s true. It’s something we should fight for, for ourselves and for others. It’s work worth doing. It’s tenderness worth seeking out. It’s something we can take in, something that can feed us. Sometimes, quite literally.

About a month after my conversation with Sallie, I sat in a different car with my friend, Laura. Things were still really hard for me, and I’d asked Laura to talk. We were sitting there, engine idling yet again (I don’t feel good about this environmentally, I feel compelled to say), and I was trying to find language for how hard it was just to wake up in the morning. There was all this burning everywhere, in my body and in the world. Everything — everything — on fire. I didn’t know what to do. Do any of us know what to do?

Of course, I stepped out of the car and there were wild strawberries growing at my feet. (I mean, really? That’s just showing off.) I picked them, smelled them, held them in my hand — took in the sweetness mixed with the astringent aroma of stem. Chewed through that beautiful pulp, licked my fingers clean. I was still me, and everything was still hard, impossibly hard. And those berries were still so sweet. All of it was true.

Questions and delights, trying to break things down. Joy as digestif. A practice, a constant ask. Can you? Can you take all that joy?