1. Daylist

To be honest with you, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two days crying. That sounds so silly when I write it out like that, but it’s true. This last week has been anything but easy. Having this assignment in the back of my head since Monday, I have tried so desperately to think of delights. They are, after all, happening around me all the time. As much as I have wanted to see them, it seems that every day, they illude me.

In my time thinking about the delights of my life, I found myself researching “What is a delight?” and reading several articles on Ross Gay’s definition of it (from his book, The Book of Delights). In one article by Sage Van Wing, where he presents the transcript of an interview between Ross Gay and Dave Miller. In this, Gay explains what “delight” means to him, how it typically forms in each day of his life, and how writing this book made him realize that delight grows when it is shared. He states:

“I feel like, actually the sort of inclination of the gift, like the way that the gift… the true gift actually happens is when we give it away. Maybe that’s a measure of how that’s a measure of what kind of a gift something is actually. In the process of writing this book, I did notice two things. I think how often the thing that delighted me would be some kind of exchange of sharing and how often my inclination, almost immediately upon witnessing the exchanges sharing, which is the exchange of gifting, is to immediately tell someone else. It wasn’t like I had to think hard about it. It was just I was inclined to be like, yo! you see this thing happening?“

This answer of his really seemed to stick out to me. I had thought over and over of the things in the last couple of days that have given me delight, been a delight, but the only real things I thought of were just the ways I have attempted to help other people. And I am not truly sure that, in the very specific definition of a delight, those count.

The other night, on a day when my tears had finally run out, my friend called me crying. And so, of course, without a second thought, I got into my car and drove to her. As the night progressed, we just talked, and I mostly listened to everything she had to say. And when I think back on that, on times when my role in my friendships is to listen, I love it more than anything. And, truly, a delight of mine is to hold space.

To me, holding space for someone is allowing them to be exactly as they are. But not in a way like, “Oh, I am not judging,” it’s a physical thing. The world around us is made of energy, right? I have energy, and everyone else has it too. And so, while in my energy field, I imagine space for this person – for her, while we talk. And although it really only happens in my head, it seems to work, and I can see evidence of it in the physical. I truly believe that when she is in my presence, she feels safe enough to be exactly as she is at that moment. And when it comes to delight, my ability to do this for the people, the people that I love so deeply in my life, is, in fact, a delight.

To be the person she calls when she is crying, to be the person she feels comfortable snot sobbing in front of, to be the person she can tell the truth to is such a delight of mine that all the time I had spent in the last couple of days crying (myself) was worth feeling and releasing so that I would have the capacity to hold that space for her when she needed it.

I sat down yesterday to write about this in more detail, but I just couldn’t get the words out. I began to wonder if that really was a delight at all. And maybe it isn’t- not in the true sense of the word, anyway.

And so here I am, again, thinking about delight. While blowing out my hair and rolling up its pieces in rollers, it hit me. Music. Every single day I have woken up this week, I have been oddly excited to find out what my “daylist” on Spotify is. From my understanding, a “daylist” is a playlist made by Spotify based on your listening history at certain times each day. They come up with a theme that represents it, and they create a playlist that includes songs you already enjoy and songs that they recommend based off of your listening history. I am not sure if I explained that well at all, but you get the point (or maybe you don’t, and I am sorry).

As someone who absolutely adores listening to new music and has a serious appreciation for ambient vibes, this playlist has been such an exciting experience. I not only find new music so easily but the vibe of that time of day is already set for me (which I love). Although this week has been a tough one, hopping on my Spotify to find out what new playlist they have curated for me has definitely been a daily delight.

2. Another Delight

My name is Madison McMahon, and for a while now, I have been thinking a lot about the word “delight.” Not only have I spent a significant amount of time reading and discussing Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which is linked above, but I have been attempting to figure out what exactly it means. Obviously, it means one thing to Gay, and it shows up in my life very differently from his, but it got me thinking about what delight meant for other people.

“DELIGHT” – Lawrence Kearney (1978):

As I was looking for poems that I could potentially connect to The Book of Delights and the meaning of delight, I came across this work. And upon my first time reading it, it felt as if all the air in the room had been sucked up and swallowed.

To me, reading this poem felt very similar to jumping from a ledge. The walk up, the looking over, the leap, and the sharpness of the fall. This poem feels like a heavy weight but also the pinching of the air that surrounds you on your way down, whistling in your ears and ripping the air out of your lungs.

It got me thinking about a whole new world of “delight.” One where the delight is not something beautiful or good but something like a failure. That maybe delight is not only found in those pretty special moments in life, but in the “evasions” and “losses” that we all experience daily. And then the “fall” of the poem, “And occasionally, / something larger…anything / you think you can’t get back.”

And then, as I thought about it more, perhaps delight is always beautiful, but just not in the way we assume it to be. In moments of deep loss, there are strange tingles of delight, of beauty. Like the beautiful human reaction to blame other people or to wish grief had hands. Or the realization that you hold the power to push and direct your life in any direction you desire. Or the simple act of crying and having someone stand there and cry with you.