delight (yes, really) — Katrina Kenison
By the time I step out of the shower, my husband is already downstairs in the kitchen. The rich, cinnamon smell of French toast wafts up to the steamy bathroom, mixing with the scent of my citrus body lotion. The day awaits. But for a moment here, after I towel off and run a brush through my hair, I stand still, quiet, noticing everything.
At the table, my husband has laid out a placemat for me, my cloth napkin in its ring. Dawn light pours through the tall windows. I measure out coffee, cut up fruit, choose a mug from the shelf, then step out into the yard for a moment to breathe in the clean morning air and listen to the woodpeckers banging away in the maple tree. Snow still blankets the ground, but something ineffable has tilted toward spring. There’s a promise of warmth beneath the cold, a releasing of winter’s grip on the land. You can feel it.
Inside, we sit as we always do, mostly silent over breakfast, reading the news on our iPads, exchanging a few words about the day’s grim tidings. There’s nothing hopeful to be found in the headlines. Crises multiply and intersect as the once unimaginable molts into reality — an intractable virus spreading through the world, Antarctica reporting record high temperatures; our election already under siege; a profane, partisan, self-serving president who lies viciously and flagrantly while denying any truth he doesn’t want to hear. The horrors seem at once urgent and, from the vantage of our own sunny kitchen table, oddly distant. “I almost don’t know how to absorb any more,” I say, pouring a second cup of coffee. “It’s all so disturbing and also kind of unreal.”
“Yes,” my husband agrees. “I know.”
And yet, on a bright winter morning, in this house, together, we are happy.
Somehow, both of these things are true. Things are bad. Things are good. And this, it seems, is the paradox of our time. Somehow we must learn to live with it. Is it possible to hold an awareness that much of our world is under siege while, at the same time, cultivating, nurturing, and expressing delight in its riches? Can we have empathy for those who suffer and, at the same time, allow ourselves moments of simple happiness when life is sweet?
“Despair is omnipresent,” a friend wrote this week. But so is goodness. In the midst of a dark, divisive time, we must remember that joy is possible, too. Not only possible, but necessary — a kind of radical and spiritually adept response to the complexity of the human condition. And perhaps our real challenge is to find a way to address everything that’s wrong while, at the same time, refusing to bow to either hatred or hopelessness.
I suspect I’m not the only one who wonders what it means at this dark moment to be a good person, a good neighbor, a contributing member of society? What does a good life look like? How can we be happy when so many others are struggling?
I believe there are as many ways to help as there are heads and hearts yearning for healing, truth, and justice. Still, considering what we’re up against, my own gestures seem small and insignificant: be kind, donate time and dollars to a campaign that stands for integrity and decency, knock on doors and make phone calls, write a letter by hand, make a meal for someone in need, engage in a conversation that attempts to bridge a divide rather than widen it. I feel better for doing what I can. And I know that, whatever I do, it will never feel like enough.
And so I must continually remind myself that although life itself can seem boundless, time is short. We’re on this earth but briefly, and it’s up to each of us, every single day, to find our own way to engage with it, both as celebrants of its beauties and as citizens who care about its future.
I’m grateful for the deep, daily pleasure I take in ordinary things. But I’m also aware of a constant, low-grade knot in my stomach, a combination of anxiety and sadness that comes of living nowadays, as so many of us do, with one other gnawing question: “Is this really the best we humans can do?”
As always when uncertain of my footing, I head this morning to my bookshelves and scan the spines. So many familiar old friends are there, patiently waiting, ready to be of use. I reach as if guided for a book I first read twenty years ago — a collection of quietly eloquent life-affirming letters by a young Jewish woman determined to maintain her faith and optimism even in the face of near certain death.
And indeed, I find in the pages of An Interrupted Life exactly what I need to hear. In one of her final letters from a Nazi detention camp in 1943, twenty-nine-year-old Etty Hillesum exclaims, “Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.” These words, written in the most extreme circumstances imaginable, strike me as a kind of lamp in the darkness, an instruction to keep paying attention.
“Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”
And so it is — if, despite everything, I take time each day to see it.
I’m delighted at this very moment by the red-capped flicker at the bird feeder, gracefully extracting sunflower seeds through the mesh with its long slender beak. I’m delighted by the steady drip of melting icicles, by the warmth on the porch where I sit typing these words, by the play of light and shadow across the table. Beauty, when I pause long enough to notice, is always at hand. These days, it feels like both a responsibility and a privilege to be aware of how precious each moment really is, and to be grateful. To quote Etty Hillesum again: “Against every new outrage and fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness.”
Etty made a point of noticing, even in the transit camp where she spent her final days, the beauty that existed alongside incomprehensible evil. “The sky is full of birds,” she wrote. “The purple lupines stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down for a chat, the sun is shining on my face, and right before our eyes, mass murder.” I have to pause and allow the extraordinary courage of those words to sink in. Etty Hillesum’s last letter was scribbled in haste; she tossed it from the window of the moving train that was carrying her to Auschwitz. It said only this: “We left the camp singing.”
It is odd, I know, to quote a concentration camp victim in an essay about happiness. But Etty Hillesum’s determination to see light in the darkness, and to comfort others with her delight in nature and her insistent faith in humanity’s goodness, is an inspiration to me at this moment. Her example suggests that to live well in this world is to honor its beauty even as we acknowledge its suffering. It’s to create peace where we are and to create wider and wider circles of peace as we can. And in these quiet moments of being, delight finds its way in. Delight is the love-child of attention. And attention is a potent and necessary antidote to despair.
When my younger son phones to get some big-picture counsel about his next steps, I’m delighted to realize this is where we are now. What a miracle, really, that the two of us are finally able to talk so openly, to trust each other, to listen, both hearts soft. It delights me to say the words “I love you” and to know he hears them.
Throughout the morning, my mom and I exchange texts about today’s Spelling Bee in the New York Times, competing against each other to find the pangram that uses all the puzzle letters and to see who can attain “Genius” level first. I’m delighted that my favorite Scrabble partner is still on her game at age 82, and that she takes her own delight in waking me up at six a.m. to let me know she’s found fourteen words before sunrise.
On a walk, I’m delighted to chat with my soul daughter in Atlanta and especially delighted that, when I tell her I’ve been actively noticing and cultivating delight today, she offers to read me a children’s book she’s found about happiness. I climb slowly up the hill toward home with her beautiful voice in my ear, telling me a story.
“An old gentleman found it in a snowflake,” she says, “in the deep cold that came from distant lands. For just a moment, he thought that he was little again.”
I tell her how much I cherish this long meandering phone visit, how happy I am being read to and catching up on a Sunday afternoon. “That’s what we do for each other,” she reminds me. “Collaborative delight.”
At the grocery store, an acquaintance greets me in the produce aisle and then steps in closer. “I want to give you a gift,” she says intently, completely surprising me. “Five minutes ago, as I was on my way over here, I saw a tree with a thousand robins in it. I had to pull over and stare at it. It was an amazing sight, like a miracle! Where did they all come from? Maybe, when you go home, they’ll still be there.” I didn’t take a detour to see if the robins had stuck around in that tree, but I didn’t really need to. For me, the delight was bearing witness to her delight.
“Cool cloud cover here,” Henry texts in a family thread as I’m making dinner, along with a photo he’s just taken from the parking lot of his Tuscaloosa apartment. “Mackerel sky,” my mom writes back, attaching a link to the Wikipedia entry. And so I’m reminded of something else about delight: it grows when we share it. With each small act of noticing and offering, we sow a few seeds of happiness. What grows, then, is our own sense of interconnectedness and belonging. What blooms and flowers in that space is love.
There is no denying the pain of loss, sorrow, fear, injustice, wrong-doing, violence, heartbreak. To be human is to hurt. But to be human is also to have an infinite capacity for hope and innate ability to see beauty in the world as it is. And in these bleak times, perhaps it’s as important to seek out moments of joy in our days as it is for us to carry the weight of all that needs fixing.
“Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”
Given the state of our fractured, imperiled world, it seems safe to say we’re in this struggle for the long haul. If we’re going to find the strength to carry on and to fight for what matters, we must also continue to celebrate what we love. To embrace delight, to dance with abandon, to soak up beauty, to share each day’s small gifts and doings, is to take care of ourselves and each other. So, if you should see a tree full of robins or a mackerel sky, be sure to tell someone. Your delight is mine.
In the spirit of sharing delights, here are a few more.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charley Mackesy
For Valentine’s Day, my friend Maude gave me a small book that continues to bring me both delight and deeper understanding. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse is a radiant, profoundly moving source of inspiration and hope for difficult times. To call it a fable or a story is to affix a label to a work that exists beyond labels. It’s really a heart offering. And Charlie Mackesy’s astonishing art says more about love and understanding than any written words could possibly express.
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
On his 42 ndbirthday poet and gardener Ross Gay decided he’d spend a year noticing and recording the small wonders and ordinary miracles we tend to overlook in our busy lives. Each day, by hand, he wrote a few paragraphs about whatever delighted him in the moment — a friendly wave from a stranger, pulling ripe carrots from the earth, a hummingbird at rest. The result is this small, intimate reminder that delight is where we find it, which is to say, everywhere. If you’d like a nudge toward delight, The Book of Delights will open your eyes and awaken your senses.
The Big Little Thing by Beatrice Alemagna
Lauren says she ordered this book after seeing an illustration on Instagram, without even knowing it was about happiness. And so, what a delight it was for her to receive Beatrice Alemagna’s poignantly evocative, slightly mysterious celebration of life’s small, fleeting wonders. And what a delight it is for me to pass the word along here. The Big Little Thing is ostensibly for children, but don’t be fooled. It’s for all of us.
This American Life: The Show of Delights
As so often happens when I’m open to what the universe has to offer, this delight was handed right to me. After writing all day, I slipped out for quick walk to clear my head. A friend had recommended an episode of “This American Life” about death, which I thought I’d listen to on my headphones. I couldn’t find it, though. Instead, up popped The Show of Delights. If you do only one thing for your heart today, listen to Act Two here, “The Squeals on the Bus,” in which a five year old boy does something delightful for the very first time: riding the school bus. The link to the entire (and entirely delightful) show is here.
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Originally published at https://www.katrinakenison.com on February 25, 2020.
