Could you use some more delight?
Join my "delight" group chat on Substack and feel a little better about the world
There is a cool feature on Substack called “Chat,” which enables authors to have ongoing conversations with subscribers. I thought this would be a wonderful way to invite the How to Feel Alive community to share delights with each other — to start a massive group delight chain, in other words.
What’s a delight practice?
As I wrote about recently in the New York Times, it’s pretty much what it sounds like: the practice of noticing and sharing things that delight you. It’s an idea I got from the poet Ross Gay, who spent a year writing an essay each day about something that delighted him, and then compiled a selection of these pieces into The Book of Delights.
Throughout the book, when he describes something that delights him, Gay marks it by including a parenthetical that says, simply, “Delight!” Examples of his delights: Pecans. Strong espressos. Cuttings from a fig tree. Pretty much anyone who calls him “sweetie.” People’s reactions when he carries a tomato plant onto a plane. A young TSA worker at the airport who mishears Gay say the word “poems” and announces to a coworker, “That guy’s being flown to Syracuse to read palms!”
Here is Ross Gay reading his essay about the delight of bringing a baby tomato plant onto a plane. I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to watch this and NOT be delighted.
Now, Gay is not a Pollyanna. Many of the essays touch upon decidedly un-delightful things, such as racism, mortality, and the loss of loved ones. And yet according to Gay, the more he focuses on noticing delight, the more he finds himself surrounded by it.
How to Start a Delight Practice
It’s quite simple. When you encounter something in your life or environment that sparks delight, no matter how small, you raise a finger in the air—and you announce, out loud and enthusiastically, “Delight!” (The out loud part is important, even if you are alone.) If someone asks you what the heck you are doing, tell them about this practice and invite them to join you.
You’ll soon discover that Gay was right: the more attention you pay to the delights in your life, the more delights will reveal themselves to you. It’s almost like tuning in to a frequency on a radio dial.
Hopefully it makes intuitive sense that focusing on the positive would boost your mood, but if you don’t believe that such things would make a difference, try spending an hour doing a twisted version of the delight exercise in which, instead of noticing and labeling delight, you respond to negative thoughts and stressful environmental cues by pointing your finger in the air and announcing, “Anxiety!” (or, depending on the context, “Fear!” or “Cause for despair!”). Then switch back over to labeling your delights and notice what a difference it makes.
Want to make it even more effective? Share your delights with other people.
The practice of noticing and labeling delights is even more effective (and fun) if you do it with other people. So invite someone else to join you—and if you don’t regularly see them in person, consider starting a delight text chain together (to me, this is an excellent use of technology) in which you share photos and anecdotes of things that delight you. Even young kids can participate in sharing delights — I’ve done this with my own daughter since she was about five and it is, well, delightful.
So enlist some friends, head on over to the chat, and let’s share some delights!
To scrolling less and living more,
PS: My intention is to have the delight chat be a running feature that you can contribute to at any time, and that is available to you to look through whenever you need a little boost. (I love looking at other people’s delights—it’s like a social media feed that actually makes you feel good.)
And then there is this version, 2,000 people delighting each other with the same song, singing altogether Africa by Toto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTmRhPsJo5M
I read the latest post on tidying ("how to get your life together") on my sofa minutes after our cleaner left and am delighting in how clean our place is.
I used to think that paying someone to clean our house was a weird feudal-era extravagance until I did a two week long mood map. NOTHING made both my and my husband's mood better than having our cleaner come, both in the hours after when everything is spotless (before outr kids and life destroy it again) and in the days all around knowing we didn't need to scrub toilets anymore. Here's to the delight of a clean flat!