Hey, friends. We’ve had a host of new folks join us in the last month or so, which fills me with deep gratitude and a not small amount of delight. Which is what I’m hoping we can converse about today. Delight, that is.
It’s felt like a funny (as in, odd) time to have new people join us, since November and December are generally a heavy and exhausting time of year for me, and I assume that comes through in the newsletter. This isn’t what I want folks to believe about practicing integrity, honestly: that it is inevitably a heavy and exhausting pursuit embarked upon by serious, dour people. Not great branding, that.
It’s also not true, because foundationally, integrity is about wholeness. The word itself is related to the word for whole number, integer, as well as the word integrated, which feels like an almost foreign concept in our currently polarized world. Like, what? Everything mixed together? Everyone even? Not compartmentalized and separate?
In fact, yes. That’s exactly what all of this “practicing integrity” business is about. Repeatedly, faithfully, imperfectly working to be whole people whose internal lives (our beliefs, feelings, dreams, and intentions) are authentically and transparently interwoven with our outer lives (our choices, behavior, impact. The ways we relate and connect with the people around us.) To be whole people means that, by definition, integrity can’t be an exclusively heavy or serious pursuit because none of us are entirely heavy or serious people.
One of the ways I remind myself that I’m not an exclusively heavy and serious person is by focusing on delight. Delight is the antithesis of seriousness, for sure, and also heaviness in an exclusive sort of way, because even when contemplating something sad, tragic, or painful the appearance or reminder of delight introduces into that experience some sort of effervescence, something that elevates and captivates us. And then, all of a sudden, we are in a different place, a place that is awake and grateful and connected, even if it is also tragic, sad, or painful still.
The phrase “carbonated holiness” comes to mind. It’s how writer Anne Lamott describes laughter, but I can’t think of any better way to also describe the visceral/emotional/spiritual feeling of delight.
As most of you probably know, I was horribly sick last week, knocked out by the flu as far as I can tell. This came on the heels of a two-week vacation from my day job, so in the end, I spent almost three weeks out of the office. This week has been an exercise in remembering how my life works generally. When I need to go to bed and wake up. What my paying job entails. How to motivate myself to do the daily and weekly chores that keep my household livable. Why I have to make consistent time to write amid everything (and what it feels like when I don’t.)
I could be salty and resentful about it all, and probably would be if I was doing the whole re-entry thing straight from vacation. But spending that third week sick as a dog has made me appreciate the simple realities of my daily life, lived while I feel well. What a delight it is! I’ve also been reading the latest book of short essays on delight by poet Ross Gay, who is probably the Patron Saint of Delight if there is one. Reading Ross always helps me keep an eye on what delights me.
So, let me share with you some of my recent delights that have bubbled up. If you wanna share some of yours in the comments, that would be great. Delightful, even. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
Delight #1: “I forgot to give this to you.”
Last night, at the tail end of the evening, my housemate came into the living room and handed me a small card with a fabric cut-out affixed to it of an indigenous Peruvian woman carrying a tiny baby in a sling on her back. The card was, it turned out, a refrigerator magnet. First off, I love a good refrigerator magnet, as well as the sort of chaotic detritus that accumulates under the magnets on my refrigerator— holiday cards, reminders of appointments, pictures of my kids when they were small, notes I received that made me smile. It’s not Instagrammable, my refrigerator, but it is a great delight to me every single day. My housemate knows this about me and so contributed to my daily delight.
Equally delightful was that she purchased that magnet for me the first time she went to Peru, nearly a year ago. When she returned last April she presented me with a couple of gifts, which were unexpected and heartwarming. Both the things themselves and the idea that while she was off adventuring she thought of me, went to the trouble of buying me gifts, and then carried them from one continent to another to give them to me. I mean, how wonderful is that?!? But she forgot about this little magnet somehow, and so then there it was, out of nowhere nearly a year later, sitting in my hand and reminding me how well she loves me across both time and space.
Also, we laughed a little bit about how we are both so forgetful sometimes, and it felt good to share a rueful chuckle at our own expense. How endlessly delightful it is to have an old friend you can laugh at yourself with.
Delight #2: He came by, just so I would be safe.
My son, who is twenty, mostly lives with me, but is in and out a lot, sleeping some nights at his dad’s house and some nights at his girlfriend’s apartment. Wednesday we crossed paths briefly when I got home from work and before he headed out to play D&D with his girlfriend and her dad and stepmom, who live down the street.
I assumed, therefore, that he was sleeping at home that night, but I didn’t know if he had his house keys (that is consistently something of a crap shoot) so when I headed up to bed I sent him a text letting him know I had left the front door unlocked for him and asking him to remember to lock up when he got in.
Just before I fell asleep, I got a reply text. He was actually sleeping at his dad’s, but he swung by our house on his way there just to lock my front door so that I wouldn’t have to get out of bed and go downstairs, and so I would be safe. The layers of delight to be found in those few sentences! That he is such a sweet, considerate young man, that we have such a great communication practice with each other, and that he loves me so well.
Delight #3: It’s in there…
The second week of my vacation, I went away on retreat for my birthday. For the first couple of days, my housemate joined me (she truly is an endless source of delight). On the actual day of my birthday, we were sitting around the cabin by the woodstove as the dark descended outside, trading music back and forth. An artist she shared with me reminded me of an artist my ex-husband introduced me to, Kelly Joe Phelps; we used to listen to him together a lot in the last years of our marriage. I put on Phelps’s album, Shine Eyed Mr. Zen, to share and was immediately transported back nearly a dozen years.
This was another unexpected, incredible delight. Not because that was a great time in my life. I was utterly devastated by the end of my marriage. But as someone who has experienced a lot of trauma, I’ve spent much of my life disassociated, hovering way up above my body to survive from day to day. Now that I’m writing a memoir, one of the consistent things that prompts extreme self-doubt is my inability to call up visceral details from some of the most intense times of my life because, in many respects, I wasn’t there. How will I ever convey the feeling of those moments without recalling sound, touch, smell, or taste?
But all of a sudden sitting in that Catskills cabin, there I was at the end of my marriage as Kelly Joe Phelps slid and danced on the strings of his steel guitar. I could see and feel all of it.
This particular song, Wandering Away, came on and then I was weeping, the heartbreak of those days crashing over me like a wave. My sweet friend didn’t say a word. She just climbed behind me on the couch, wrapped her arms around me, and all of it— the remembered sensations and grief, and the very current love— felt like a benediction, the bestowing of a blessing.
What poignant delight!
Delight #4: A politics of shared delight
Perhaps everyone is hyper-aware of the upcoming U.S. presidential election because our politics looms so large over the world. But every American I know is filled with anticipatory dread these days, for sure. This is largely due to the inevitability of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee, but it is also because we tend to experience politics, just like practicing integrity, as heavy, serious business. But maybe it doesn’t have to be?
This week, Garrett Bucks over at The White Pages offered an example of a politics of shared delight in such a funny, earnest way the newsletter itself was a delight. In it, he was highlighting the work of the Finnish government to provide gift boxes to every new parent in the entire country, full of carefully curated, high-quality infant supplies and clothing. Reflecting on our current American political reality and how it constricts our imagination, Garrett wrote:
I’ve been thinking about baby boxes precisely because I live in a country that has chosen the siren call of laissez faire economics and White supremacy rather than collective care. And I worry that living in that society— even for those of us who dream of something better— has an erosive effect on our collective sociological imagination…we sometimes ask proactively for something new— for Medicare For All, or Universal Healthcare, for reparations for Black and Indigenous Americans. But we rarely ask for our government to go all out in caring for us, to surprise and delight us, to offer mass transit that we can’t wait to board, a customer service experience at government agencies that is second to none, public schools in low income communities that look like true cathedrals of learning, and yes, a box full of baby clothes that makes us all coo “sooooo cute.”
We ought to demand delight from our government! Unreasonable levels of delight, in fact! And we should demand to be taxed— progressively, of course, in a way that asks much more of the wealthy and of corporations than the rest of us, but still— in order to receive those genuinely lovely public services. So too should we demand that our government wastes less money on expenditures that don’t delight anybody (bombs and guns, for one). And no, we shouldn’t give a damn at all about means testing, because once again the goal should be to make the kind of bespoke experiences that the wealthiest amongst us can already afford available to everybody, no questions asked.
Let us never accept anything less than a politics of shared delight.
In this election year, maybe we would be better served (and less full of dread), if we focused our energy on what we want rather than what we don’t, approaching the process not as a way to avoid apocalypse but to invite in a politics of shared delight.
Delight #5: Democracy, according to Margaret Atwood
Okay, last one. I know, I’m waxing on. But it’s been a pretty delightful week!
Is there anyone better prepared to explain the current political moment and our imperiled democracy than Margaret Atwood? Maybe, but Margaret has already done it, and with animation!
A well-narrated animation that explains complex political realities efficiently and effectively is an utter delight for the particular kind of nerd I am. This week, the Financial Times published this video with Atwood as part of a series on democracy. It is so good, y’all:
That’s it for this week, lovelies. I hope, in pursuit of showing up as a whole person in the world, you keep your eyes and hearts open to delight.
Until we meet here again.
XO, Asha
P.S. It’s still January for a couple of weeks, which means there’s still time to get 30% off paid memberships to the newsletter, in honor of our 3rd anniversary. A delightful gift from me to you.