On Delight and Why It Matters

with a book recommendation and a practice to try...

Hello from summer-in-the-city, a time and place I am very much enjoying. These last weeks have been busy and delicious, just exactly that wide-open summertime I long for all winter long. I’ve been hosting parties, reading novels, eating berries by the handful, living in sandals and ponytails. It’s been so fun to catch up with friends, try a few new restaurants, put in as many hours a day as possible in our beloved courtyard.

Last night I went to a writers’ group—a bar in the East Village full of the most inspiring, extraordinary women. I stopped on the way at Russo’s for roasted artichoke and a prosciutto loaf, and on the way home, the city was buzzing with bright and wild summer energy. When I came home, Henry and his friends were making dinner, music loud, kitchen a mess—just perfect, really.

I’ve had a note on my desk for ages to write to you about delight—a topic very dear to my heart and central to my spiritual practice—and what better time than the full tilt of summer, a season for me that always seems bursting with invitations to delight around every corner?

You’ve heard me say many times that I want to be a person who has an extremely low bar for delight—meaning that I don’t just feel delight when I see the Eiffel Tower or dazzling fireworks, but that I’m full-heart-lifted at a silly joke from my 11 year old or a gust of wind through the branches in our courtyard. I want to live easily-delighted—that’s one of my core values.

There are a lot of ways to define something like delight, and here’s my definition: DELIGHT is when we engage our senses and our spirits to experience the world God made, and in that moment, we feel a welling up of joy, goodness, and gratitude.

Delight floods our hearts when we hear a song we love, when we stand in front of a painting that moves us, when we watch a child play, when we taste something and all at once our senses are awakened by texture and flavor and smell.

In our family, we use the phrase buzz the beach, which means going just a little bit out of your way to see something beautiful, magical, inspiring. It’s always worth the extra few minutes or extra flight of stairs or extra block out of your way to get a glimpse of something that lifts your heart--that’s delight: that bright little lifting of your heart.

It brings us back to our senses and connects us to the world we live in. In my experience, when we’re in great pain, we tend to isolate, to tune out our senses, and delight cracks through that thick glass of isolation and reconnects to people and to life.

And delight is a bridge to gratitude. Gratitude, as you know, is another one of my most-central spiritual practices. It’s an absolute lifeline…and also, if I’m honest, sometimes when someone urges me toward gratitude while I’m right in the middle of great pain, I have a quick impulse to pinch that person (just me?). I believe wholeheartedly in gratitude, and also I know it’s sometimes a very long distance to traverse…and that’s the particular magic of delight: it builds a little bridge inside our hearts--it’s like this: I might not at all be ready to say anything even resembling “thank you for this day.” But I can listen to the birdsong and recognize it as beautiful. I can nurse a broken heart, miles from gratitude, and simultaneously treasure the taste of a perfect peach, juice running down my chin. Delight inches us toward gratitude without marching us there, and I especially love that aspect of it—the gentleness of delight, the light touch of it.

This is important: delight is never denial. It’s never bright-siding, silver-lining, toxic positivity. Delight comes to sit next to you in the dark and whispers gently. Delight isn’t escapism or unwillingness to face reality—it’s acknowledging both aspects of reality. Delight is the balance to exhaustion, despair, and numbness. Delight doesn’t fix what’s broken, but it gives us the fuel to keep going even in the brokenness.

There’s something about delight that’s deeply personal—attuned to your memories, your sense of nostalgia, your personal sense-history, your body and brain and heart. And there’s something about it that involves relinquishing your tight grasp on your plan or your time or your to-do list…delight rarely comes on schedule, and almost never when we’re hustling and controlling. There’s a magical little letting-go that you have to be willing to do in order to leave yourself open to delight.

And here’s one last idea: the experience of delight isn’t just for you—it’s for all of us. It’s to be shared, to be offered to the people around you as a reminder that the world is beautiful, even when faced with a whole lot of evidence to the contrary.

When my neighbor comes back from a long bike ride, invigorated and full of life, that delight is contagious. When my friend spends all day in her pottery studio, and later that night she tells me, eyes shining, about the different glazes and colors, when she says that time stopped for a while today while she made beautiful things with her hands, her delight spills over on to me, and I’m so grateful. When my mom walks me through her shade garden, her long fingers reaching for every bloom and branch as she tells me about each one, I’m basking in her delight—and in all of those moments, I don’t have to be a long-distance cyclist or a ceramicist or a gardener. I just have to be present to their delight, and nourished by it—what a gift!

Here's to being easily delighted, to nourishing one another with our contagious delights, and to buzzing the beach as absolutely often as possible…

A few next steps: a treasured book and a favorite practice—

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delight is an all-time favorite of mine—it’s a collection of little beautifully-written pieces, each one a meditation on something he finds delightful…a little girl’s perfect ponytail bouncing behind her as she crosses the street, something in his garden, a phrase he hears at a coffee shop that reminds of someone he loves. And listening to it on audio is extra beautiful. What I love about this book is that it trains you to mine your own life for your own moments of delight—Gay uses such beautiful language to capture what he finds delightful, and as you read, you’ll find your own mind and heart turning toward your own heart’s delights.

And if you want to take a next step (see what I did there?) on your own, I highly suggest a Delight Walk—and it’s just what it sounds like: a little walk wherein you focus your senses on noticing everything—the smells and sounds and textures of your neighborhood or block, where you pay attention to everything, or maybe even take a few pictures of things you find to be funny or beautiful. I take photos on my phone constantly, because capturing those little images is a way to remind myself to be on the lookout all the time for something beautiful or surprising. And like anything, the more you notice, the more you’ll notice. The block you’ve walked down a thousand times without thinking will spring to life with colors and dimensions and sounds you never noticed before, more every day, walk by walk, sense by sense.