Delights

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.

In my Honors 101 class, we have a single required text, a work by Ross Gay called The Book of Delights. As someone who is enamored by the written word, the concept of such a work intrigued me from the beginning. The author gave himself the task of writing a short essay every day for a year on something that delighted him that day, and our assignment using these texts is to find and discuss essays pertaining to certain topics within our modules. Being an Honors class, the course is heavily discussion based, and today, after we had shared all of our chosen essays, we were tasked with discussing for a brief moment things that delighted us. 

I focused on things I missed that filled with me delight -- hiking in the mountains behind my home, tracking animals, and fishing the creeks -- and this led my group into talking about other things we missed. Again and again, mentions of life as it was "before" came up. People missed interactions; they missed hanging out with their friends without masks or social distancing; they missed having little worries of such concepts each time they left their homes or rooms; they missed being human. I left class inspired, but I also left class deeply saddened. How could things have changed so much? 

My class is about a twenty minute walk from my dorm, and on my way back, something kept coming to my mind. One of my classmates shared back a certain essay that I couldn't get out of my mind. It was titled "The High-Five from Strangers, Etc.", and it focused on the author getting a random high five in a café by a stranger. He reflected that this simple act of kindness, this random act of humanity, brightened his day, enough so that he devoted a chapter of his assignment to it. As I walked, the sounds of muted life occurring around me, swaddled in the cloth of masks imprinted with the UK insignia, the essay made me think about all those threads of interactions by strangers -- tiny nods, miniscule chit-chat, gentle smiles -- forming a massive web of delight. Sure, not everyone loves these interactions, but most of us very much do, even if we aren't entirely aware of it. 

And as I turned onto Avenue of Champions, I remembered all those interactions my classmates spoke of, all those little moments that had evaporated thanks to this pandemic. All that humanity, gone. I wish I could say I felt more connected to my classmates, but I don't. I wish I could say I felt more connected to the people at my college in general, but I don't. And I don't think I even realized why until now. The humanity is gone. Oh, we try to restore it; we try to communicate, and laugh together, and pretend it's all okay. For the most part, it is okay. But we've lost a part of ourselves. We're walking around with our ties undone, our shirts untucked, our buttons disheveled. We're not whole anymore. Try as we might, one cannot ignore the way a mask stifles our smiles and expressions as we pass one another on the street, or the way these regulations quiet our friendships and our ability to form them. 

I think that we sometimes forget that this pandemic hasn't simply assaulted us on the front of health. It has assaulted us on all fronts, including the most human front of all: interaction. The soul of our society has been dulled just a tab, a facet of our lives sanded down and eroded. And I think it does some good to realize that, to understand it and come to terms with it. Tonight, I'll be writing a list of delightful things that I miss, and when I'm done, I'll crumple it up and start over. Then I'm going to make a list of delightful things I can reach.