In the past two weeks I have had two Conversations with Friends that have affirmed anew my belief in the positive effects of reflection and writing. That it is in the distance between experience and recording of that experience that the possibility of sustained joy, self-understanding, gratitude, and delight is found. When we simply exist in the moment, it is either evanescent or overwhelming. Distanciation – what I understand as the putting of distance between yourself and your experience, also, paradoxically, deepens that experience. In writing, I understand myself and my world better, I separate myself from my feelings, and I can examine the experience that made me happy or sad by turning it into an objective reality to be viewed from the outside. I’ve said something similar before on these pages.
I was telling my friend about our half-term spent with my parents in Cape Town. My mom had given the kids an old-school workbook wrapped in brown paper to record their holiday adventures. Each time we did something, we would encourage them to draw a picture about it. The trip on the aeroplane where Kingsley’s rubber snakes were confiscated (rubber snakes are not allowed on a plane, who knew? Tears-tears-tears), a trip to the Natural History Museum to see the enormous whale skeleton, a coffee date with Pappou, games with Granny, feeding the squirrels in The Company’s Garden. It brought back memories of my own childhood where my mom would encourage me to keep a scrapbook of our holidays – money from Swaziland with its zig-zag edges, red lucky bean from outside my grandparents’ flat in East London, fuzzy bits of mohair collected from some or other farm.
Above: Kingsley’s drawing of crab found at Woolly’s rock pool in Kalk Bay. Delightful.
My friend said to me, ‘so your mom ensured you started doing pages at an early age’. And it dawned on me that I was raised to reflect on my experiences, and it filled me with a rush of affection for my parents, that they cultivated in me the ability to write about my world, my thoughts, and feelings. It is very empowering to be able to externalise what collects in pools in one’s mind.
In the second conversation, a different friend recommended a This American Life podcast to me called “The Show of Delights”. And it was truly a delight to listen to. The guest anchor of the show, Bim Adewunmi, starts by speaking about poet Ross Gay’s, Book of Delights. It was a project of recording one thing every day that delighted him. Simple things, profound things. But keeping track of them was the crucial thing. To hunt for the delight and make note of it.
Paraphrasing Ross, Bim says that it is negligent not to honour and share what delights you. We should not only find delight in things, but cultivate our sense of delight and share it with others. We need to train our curiosity to be able to experience delight. In this sense we need to be disciplined in our pursuit of delight. We need to look for it, and when we experience it, we need to turn it over in our hands and examine it. The delight is amplified through this practice. If we share this with others, “Oh look at this magnificent rainbow”, they too will delight in the delight. Maybe this is the best version of Instagram.
In conversation on the podcast, the host and guests speak of how delight is enhanced when it stands alongside pain. In having experienced pain, you are more readily able to identify delight and treasure it for the precious thing that it is. You understand loss, or things not working out as you thought they would, and by contrast joy stands out starkly in the darkness.
This might just seem like silver-lining talk, but I think that the added practice of recording the delight is what makes these contrasts worthwhile. For example, one of the delights of adult life is that almost no feeling is completely new, it might be different and unfamiliar, but you or someone you know has probably felt something similar, and this special kind of maturity allows you to know that what is going on right now in your heart, is not what will be going on always. You will come out the other side, you will feel joy, and heartbreak, again.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rainer Rilke
Kingsley, our first child, was born at 34 weeks. This meant that he had to spend some time in the Neonatal ICU. It was a traumatic birth and a traumatic time. What I hated most of all was that he didn’t come home with us. People arrived at the house to bring flowers and food and congratulate us on the birth of our baby, but there was no baby. It felt like a death. It broke my heart. I think that might have been the beginning of my postnatal anxiety, but who really knows the answers to these things.
Then, when Kingsley was just eight months old, I fell pregnant with Pippa. I freaked out. I could not do this again. So, I went to a counsellor to talk through my previous birth. It was a powerful experience, she helped me redeem what I felt was a broken beginning. She asked me to examine the time in the NICU anew and find the good that came of that time (other than my most beautiful and loved son, obviously). The answer, it turns out, is that Warwick and I are a good team. We draw close to each other in crisis instead of pushing each other away. It was an affirming, and delightful, discovery.
Now whenever the shit hits the fan, which it has done, a few times, and I’m sure will again, I remember that at our lowest ebb we cleaved together, not apart. Delight at that knowledge has matured into gratitude and security. But I would not have known this as deeply had it not been for the initial heartbreak + reexamination.
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So here is my suggestion on the Discipline of Delight. If to achieve humanity, you must share delight, cultivate it, what better way than to do it as a collective? I would like to start a little side-feature on /ˈbeɪb(ə)l/ called “Delight Interruption”, which rhymes, in my head, with polite interruption. So, a nice interruption to your day to remind you that not all is lost.
If there is something in your day that has delighted you, please email it to me and I will share it here, anonymously if you wish. Profound or profane, all delights welcome.
hannah.botsis@gmail.com subject line: Delight Interruption
I’ll start.
Delight Interruption 1:
I subscribed to the New Yorker some months ago. The digital edition. But part of the subscription deal was a canvas tote bag with The New Yorker written on it. I never thought it would arrive. But would you believe it, in these times of Post Office business rescue, I still got a slip in my post-box to fetch my parcel from our local Post Office. I picked it up this morning, and it has delighted me all day.
Your turn :)
"Delight interruption": what a delight to read this blog, this issue of the Discipline of Delight, and the invitation to contribute.
Delight interruption: I love coffee shops for the smells, the noise of steam and dribbling liquid, hushed conversations, the clink or clunk of china on a table. But mostly for the universe of persons and personalities--all doing the same thing, having a cuppa but all so different. (It's why I love being in airports --the multiplicity of humanness, all simultaneously being attached to travel).
So, this week in a new coffee shop I am welcomed and seated by a brightly smiling warm young man wearing a name badge reading "Christian". Without asking if that was his name instead I asked "Well, are you one?". Quick as a snap and with eyes sparkling he replied "Yes sir! Are you?" No arrogance nor suggestive persuasiveness that I should be anything, just delight in identity and wanting to extend both the delight and Identity to me.
Coffee and breakfast arrives (the lightest of croissants and a double espresso), delivered to my table by another young man tall and elegant in movement and posture. And again, a delightful smile. With a slight accent (Francophone--Congolese, I learn) says :"Tuck in and enjoy your breakfast, sir".
His name tag reads "PARFAIT"!
I felt like I was been given one, and/or was enjoying one since arriving.
Parfait and Christian: delightful interruptions to my drowsy early morning.
Have been meaning to tell you for days now that your Substack is one of the highlights of my week. It is such easy reading, so human, so thoughtful.