SEVEN FROM "THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS"

Early in The Book of Delights, Ross Gay describes developing a “delight muscle. . . Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”  Exercise your own delight muscle with seven examples from the ambassador.

— “Or when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.”

— “Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private e-mail to the group or burned the soup or ordered your cortado with your fly down or snot on your face or opened your umbrella in the bakery, as the cutest little thing?”

— “One of the great delights of my life, when I get to do it, is staring into the ceiling or closet from my bed, or looking at the slats of light coming into the room, or the down of dust hovering on the blinds, recalling my dreams.”

— “The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. . . This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”

— “Perhaps delight is like a great cosmic finger pointing at something. That’s not it. Perhaps delight is like after the great cosmic finger has pointed at something, and that something (which in all likelihood was already there, which is why I’ve enlisted a cosmic finger rather than a human one) appears. A-ha! Or, Whoa! Yes!”

— “I adore bobblehead toys, one of which passed by me on a dashboard maniacally agreeing to everything. . .the fact that people are delighted by such goofy, ridiculous things, which reminds me of a fairly common childlike-ness, which encourages softheartedness, I think.”

— “And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests—and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem—that our delight grows as we share it.”