Simple, Pleasures
Small Joys in the Arriving Season
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A stream of boiled water over coffee grounds made in five minutes of quiet. A favorite pen across a page. A brief evening with a friend. A dog barking, some sunset, a grounding sound — some joy, savored.
The season arrives. Coolness comes. Already the days diminish in daylight. Already I feel a grief creep in, favoring the full days’ heat and sunlight. Look up to see the glimmer of the river, instead. The steadiness and gift of minutes, the currents as they change — these joys of nature, these reminders of life’s insistence. See the structures of buildings, of wonder, this city as the season slowly takes form.
Leaves, are fire-orange red, citrine yellow green, and deep burgundy like red purple wine, fall and form their constellations on the ground and signal this shifting. Figs ripening on the ends of leaves. The stars shine, and in the city, if you look closely toward the night sky, in the gray-blue dusk one single star may whisper. Still, skyscrapers, along the skylight. Still, rivers and bridges. Soon, Autumn in its fullness.
To arrive to the season, I make a list. I ground down. This practice is an inventory; writing lets me know where I am. On one sheet of paper, blank and untethered, I make a list: angers, frustrations, resentments. Anything lingering, dense, built up. Get them all out, I tell myself. I write through the initial resistance. I write until the page is full. I write until some feeling forms and the sentiment spills out. The practice is a pot of something hot bubbling over. No longer holding it in, turning to the page to contain it, clear it out. Then I rip it up, releasing it, turning page and feeling into confetti. I scatter it around. I feel joy as I do this. I scoop up the remnants and throw it all out.
Then, on a page inside of a notebook — something more permanent, I’ll want to keep — I make a list of joys. At the precipice of practice I’m present and feeling uninspired, on the edge of neutral. Again, the practice begins. I write words, memories, phrases. Joy is the anchor. I fill up the page. The small joys are drops of water, first, until they flow, full of feeling, a gentle steady force. I stop to feel how in the act of writing the joy compounds. There is a warmth I feel, building and emanating. A connection with my internal world. By the end, the page is full of notes, and joy expresses itself through the boundaries of my body, ripping into my cells. What we pay attention to compounds, and this is the dialogue of mind and body. This writing, embodied.
Little wonders add up. I ask my friends about their own small joys, their small messages on my screen bubble up in reply. On the lists, across the landscape of our shared curiosities, we agree on small things — hot coffee in the mornings, mostly, blue skies. Then other wonders: like daylight. Like seasons’ cooling and the comfort of clothes. Fresh air, and an open window. Little wonder it takes little to see the ripple effects of joy and watch them take form. Little wonder it takes so little to spark joy.
Studies show it takes five instances of joy, or something positive, to outweigh a moment of harshness. That our minds are primed to keep us safe, and so we grip, and grasp, run away from danger, and brace ourselves against the waves of life and challenges. This grip, when held too long, leaves little spaciousness for the good to take form. Simple joy, then — this practice to ground. A practice for five minutes, with one good pen, and two sheets of paper.
Your joy is a force grounded in the small practices, the simple pleasures of presence, of now. First you will feel the small joys, and then they will open you up to your capacity. You will savor the daylight, the drops of water, learning to breathe them in, and feel them deeply, come to know and savor the sensation.
From there, this joy will rise. You will know a deep full whole joy — one that ripples out like sunlight that makes gold across the ocean, one that fills you up in your whole embodied form, letting you know of both your boundaried body and your boundlessness.
Because this joy, there at the edges of your physical form, coming up like goosebumps, will find some way to express itself beyond you. There, inspiration is carried like breath on wind. You will know the full deep joy of wholeness, of your internal world in the act of creating. You will sing out, paint in color, sculpt in idea, shape or form, make families, make buildings, create communities. You will collaborate with joy through challenge, through density, through intensity, along with some larger essence of expression beyond only what your body can contain. Starlight, insight, laughter, some color, some taste, some song. The personal becomes universal and everything takes form.
Lately, I look to the leaves. Still green, mostly. Soon, they will make their way to their inevitable confetti on the ground below, in this ephemeral now, eventual returning. What I return to with the cycles and seasons of life is continuity: that there is some force, this force of life, urging us onward — some momentum forward no matter how small. We may feel stagnant in stuck in life, in body and moment, in challenge and mind — and still the sun comes. The trees grow leaves, and understand inherently when it’s time to fall to the ground. The ocean continues, waves in concert with gravity. Isn’t that astounding? I think about how despite anything and everything, that there is some spark, some infinity, that keep us going: breath in our lungs, rhythms in our heartbeats, reviving the daylight, without having to think.
I come back to the small joys for their steadiness. There’s a waning sunflower, a person biking by, a hot bowl of soup, a leaf, and a cloud, a phone call, a glance, conversation, a bird in the sky, a page to turn, a train passing, a pen to write with. All these small joys. Here is a breath, and here is a cup of water, no longer taken for granted. Before the Universe was formed, void. There were no city lights, no skylines. No pop songs or espresso, no glaciers or shopping malls or bird songs or pulsing music. And now? All of this. Look, feel, and sense around. Presence with the small wonders of life compounds.
So I meditate on the smallest of things, tuning my attention toward them like a heartbeat. Back to the small things. Morning run, a page to write on, breakfast on the table, infinite possibilities, friends on the other line, a hot cup of coffee.
On the last day of Summer, a bird flies by. Magnolia warbler, dusty green, on the flight path back during migration. I see it, fleeting, in the corner of my eye, and feel as two small single tears hover at the corner of my eyes. A glimmer moment. A sliver of seeing. A small wonder. Big joy.
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