Every day for a year, Ross Gay wrote an essay about something he delighted in. (Whenever I feel fussy about slicing for 31 days in a row, I’m going to think of Gay, essentially slicing for 365 days in a row!) At the beginning of the collection of short essays that resulted from his project, Gay writes: “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. How wonderful to imagine delight as a muscle that we can develop through practice and use!
Here are a few reliable sources of delight for me:
- latte art
- a lap of cats
- front doors painted bright yellow
- cats giving themselves puffy tails when they play
- spotting wildlife on my drive to work
- when the library has the obscure book I’m looking for
- eavesdropping on conversations
- train stations
- getting packages in the mail
- when someone suggests pizza on a night I really didn’t want to cook
- leftovers
- all our family in-jokes
- sunrises and sunsets over the Great Plains
- pit bull sightings
- when a new recipe is a keeper
- waking up to find lots of comments on my blog
- Internet rabbit holes (y’all, there’s a Latte Art Championship!)
- when the very first slice I read in the morning gives me an idea for my own slice!
What are your reliable sources of delight? And thanks to Darin Johnston at The Life of a Conflicted Teacher for today’s topic.
the dirigible plum 
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