D is for Delight

via Cream Your Day

Delight is a word I use a lot. Like joy, it is not the same as happiness, although not entirely unrelated -- which is to say, a life full of joy and delight tends to be a happy one, although I'm not sure, somehow, that it goes the other way. I think of happiness as a state of being, one that can last moments or years. But both joy and delight strike me as transient, the hummingbirds of emotion: one flash of brilliant feathers and a lingering impression of vividness and color, and that's it; you don't get to hang onto it. Happiness you can have, I think, but joy and delight you only get to taste. But that taste, that glorious flash, is one of the things that makes life most worth living.



Where I tend to think of joy as a very exultant, expansive feeling, one that connects you to the rest of the universe, my idea of delight is a little smaller, a little more personal. My sense of joy is very much linked to a sense of sharing, of expansion, of connection - to other people, to a place or landscape, to the universe at large. Delight is almost a microcosm of joy, then, in that I experience it as joy in something very small - such as a beautiful flaky cinnamon roll, the first dipping of toes into cool water on a hot day, opening a really good new book, or learning that my partner is coming home early to take me on a picnic. Unlike joy, I also associate delight with a sense of surprise, or newness - the feeling of being almost taken aback by the pleasure or beauty of something. ("Delighted to meet you," we say.) I do believe that both joy and delight come from a sense of warmth, gratitude, graciousness, compassion -- all those good words that we use to talk about engaging with our existence in an open-hearted and open-minded way. (I don't believe that this is necessary for happiness, although I certainly do think it helps.)

I will eat them all. Via Eat Good 4 Life

I spend a lot of time feeling delight, and for this I am astoundingly grateful. I certainly didn't do anything special to deserve it or earn it; it's just been how I've experienced the world from a very young age. I am completely convinced that this has a great deal to do with my parents. When I was a kid we were pretty darn poor - not starving, not in danger, but in the kind of financial straits that led my parents to joke, when they heard somewhere that a surprisingly large percentage of families are only two paychecks away from homelessness, "TWO paychecks? Those lucky bastards!" (They laughed about it when they told me, years later, but I don't think it seemed so funny then - because it was true.) This being said, I had absolutely no idea whatsoever. Not because they lived beyond their means, or hid it from me, or anything like that -- I just thought I had everything a kid could possibly want. This is because my folks cultivated an air of festivity around the simplest things: our Friday-night trip to the ice cream shop, a china seal put under my pillow for bad dreams, it didn't matter: it was a treat, a special thing, something to be excited about. They learned very quickly that all I needed to be perfectly happy was a tasty thing to eat, and so the unofficial family motto was born: "When in doubt, grab a snack." They made sure that anything from a hot chocolate to a fresh nectarine seemed like a wonderful and exciting thing. I'm pretty sure I didn't whine & cry much as a kid over things I wanted & didn't get to have, although I certainly went through the stabbing, all-encompassing, normal childhood longing for everything from a Polly Pocket to a stuffed otter to a stack of cream puffs as big as my head (hell, I still want - and can't afford - a stack of cream puffs as big as my head.) I still feel it, all the time: the delight, for example, of learning that my friend Christina loves dollhouse as much as I do, and then the delight of seeing one she built in all its minute perfection. Small things - sometimes literally as well as figuratively - can fill us with a disproportionate, miraculous amount of pleasure.

a glimpse of Christina's dollhouse, from her awesome blog

This is why this story about Brooklyn parents lashing out at innocent ice cream sellers horrifies me. I mean, obviously their entitlement is utterly disgusting - what kind of person can say the words "I shouldn't have to fight with my child every warm day on the playground just so someone can make a living!" with a straight face? - but although Jezebel says every snide thing I'd like to say about it much more eloquently than me (I just get too hopping mad to be funny about it), what really makes me sad is that those kids are never going to grow up with the memory of a thousand small delights. Any parent who would rather castigate an ice cream seller's existence than deal with a crying five-year-old is not going to have the patience and presence of mind to instill the lesson that every small treat is a marvelous thing.

You know what makes for a really easy path to a happy life? Needing nothing more than fresh bread, the company of a friend, an hour in the bookstore, a walk in the woods, or a book and a snack to feel like something wonderful has happened to your day. Delight lives in the simplest and sweetest of pleasures. It exists in the moment of discovery of a bird's nest, an unexpected gift, the glory of having time to get a cool drink on a warm evening. It is not a complex feeling; it is a reaction, the heart startled into flight by a sudden pleasant breeze. It requires a lack of demand and a lack of entitlement: if you feel that you deserve or expect something, it is much harder to be delighted by it. Thus, carrying an openness inside yourself is the best way to cultivate it. That's not to say one should have no expectations of anything at any time; it simply means not taking anything for granted and not being grasping or greedy when it comes to the things that can be delightful.

Photo: Eloise Parker via Flickr

In addition to surprise and newness, I think delight can also come up in situations when there is a deferral of pleasure, an "at last!" moment - sinking into a bubble bath at the end of a long day can be delightful, for example. But again, it requires the suspension of demand: grumbling  "It's about time I got to take this fucking bubble bath, geez," is not likely to lead to a delightful experience. Relaxing or pleasant, maybe, once you unwind a little bit, but you'll never be able to recapture the sweetness, the sense of it being a treat, if you approach it like it's your right and not a tiny party that you're throwing for yourself.


Delight is one of the magical sensations that marks the human experience. Even in the midst of suffering, there is still room for moments of delight, that hummingbird, even if it darts away before you've hardly seen the flash of its jeweled tail. But in order to find it, you must be willing to be delighted - which means cultivating an openness, a willingness to be surprised, a sense of pleasurable anticipation, of celebration, of tiny festivals lighting their lamps throughout your life.

What are the things that delight you? What are the most luminous moments of delight you can recall? What has been an obstacle for you to experiencing delight? I'd love to know!