The Last Word On Nothing

Up here in Seattle we have reached the Dark Wet season, which always leaves me grasping for any glimmer of hope or joy. I have always liked the idea of keeping a gratitude journal, but the few times I’ve tried it, I end up fixating on the same lovely things in my life, like friends and family and having a warm bed to sleep in (usually because I am writing in said journal from the warm bed). Recently, I picked up Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, a series of lovely essays Gay wrote about small pleasures he encountered in the course of his days: the joy of writing on paper, being called baby by a flight attendant, how nice it is when people have nicknames. (Sidenote: it feels extremely unfair when poets write prose. The precision and sparkle of their words! See also: Ocean Vuong’s work.) Inspired by Gay, I wondered what small things I’d notice if I committed to keeping my own running tab of delights.

So, what is a delight? After a couple months of writing mine down, I’m still not sure. I do know what it’s not: it can’t be a personal accomplishment, or something I have personally manufactured for my own joy, like going on vacation. Most often, they are fleeting, hard-to-capture moments that I would otherwise forget — ones that generate unexpected emotion: amusement, surprise, awe, reverence. My only rule was that delights cannot be forced; whatever I put on the list had to provoke a genuine moment of excitement in me. All the better if I have no clue why I’ve been drawn to something. Initially, I’d wanted to find one delight a day, but I quickly found that some days just aren’t delightful.

The practice of maintaining this list has been a delight in itself. The simple act of holding onto the memory so I can write it down later only prolongs the delight, and a little ping of satisfaction strikes again whenever I enter the item into the list.

A sampling:

• October 27: a giant maple leaf that got caught in the back wheel of my mountain bike halfway up Grand Ridge.
• October 28: a particularly beautiful gnarled, braided tree root I saw on a walk around the neighborhood.
• October 30: a black lab sitting next to our table at a restaurant who began howling along with a passing firetruck.
• November 2: a nonsensical note I wrote to myself at 2am about the dream I’d woken up from.
• November 10: a squirrel with an enormous apple in its mouth scampering up a tree. the weight of the apple kept dragging him back down the trunk but amazingly, he succeeded at carrying the apple up to some branches where he could munch in peace.
• November 13: while at a stoplight, a man crossed the street in front of me, and he was wearing a backpack with a little grey french bulldog inside.
• November 16: I thought I saw broken green glass glinting in the cracks of the sidewalk, but once I got closer, I saw they were actually clumps of clover.
• November 17: the nearly-full moon over an A-frame home.
• November 19: taking a walk around 6pm and admiring the dinner aromas wafting from neighbors’ homes. one smelled like a winter stew, and another like butterscotch.
• December 2: a fat cat that looked like an old man. I really don’t know how to explain this one further.
• December 3: a mysterious pile of ice dumped outside the light rail station.
• December 5: watching a man wrestle a Christmas tree into his Subaru’s roof rack. the tree fit exactly, and his satisfaction was contagious.
• December 8: a gym full of men lifting hard at the Crossfit studio while blasting Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles.”
• December 19: soft orange light from a near-solstice sunset projected onto a concrete wall, and my shadow in it.

If these make no sense to you, dear reader, I would completely understand — and I would love to hear about your own strange delights.