An Homage to Delight
“Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private email 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?”
The short answer to this question, posed by Ross Gay in his Book of Delights, is no. Inclined to the socially awkward and mortified by my small mishaps and mistakes, I am, at best, resigned to such daily embarrassments. Always prone to concern, my life has developed into a laundry list of frets, worries, fears, and anxieties. I worry about, yes, making a fool of myself. I worry about tripping, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, laughing too loudly. In short, I worry about revealing myself to be human. Yet here Gay challenges his audience to take delight in the awkward stumbles of personhood. To see my small faults as something other than faults—more so, as something adorable—was revolutionary to me. In the midst of my fears, I had never once considered I might regularly be missing something key: delight.
Ross Gay, an upcoming speaker at the 2026 Festival of Faith & Writing here at Calvin University, has cultivated himself into a connoisseur of delight. Award-winning poet and essayist, Gay prioritizes joys—both large and small. Some time ago, he decided to write an essay a day for a whole year about something that delighted him. He uses delight to express desire and lament, joy and curiosity. (I personally take delight in his long sentences littered with language jewels. Gay inspires me to stretch my own linguistic legs, to reach further and move more ambitiously in my prose pursuits.)
Writing about delights does not mean neglecting pain and fear and suffering.
Gay does not only write about the sweet and flowery. Writing about delights does not mean neglecting pain and fear and suffering. Rather, he uses delight to remind us to resist cruelty and to instead celebrate small moments of love and connection. Delight is not far from fear and despair, that other, more costly side of humanness. As Gay puts it, “terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.” Gay doesn’t regard this pairing as something to be feared. Instead, he asks: “What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?” What if there is community to our pain, what if it is a kind of delight? Gay’s essays act as the extension of a hand, the invitation to join in this celebration of everyday life—the little miracles we take for mistakes. He looks for delight, even in the most difficult or bittersweet of circumstances. Gay reminds us that the acute pain of being a human does not rob us of our delight; it may even be entwined with it.
I am fond of compiling lists in my head of future troubles. What ifs and might bes prick at my mind like mosquitoes. Yet, in the bustle of swatting my hand at ever collecting concerns, I waved away present delights. I discounted small present wonders amidst demands I will forget tomorrow. While the pressures of each day are constantly fading and reproducing themselves, always new yet ever present, delights linger as impressions on my heart long after my mind and memory have moved on.
In honor of Ross Gay’s choice to look for delight, everywhere, everyday, I have compiled my own list of delights. The delights below represent only a small portion of the beautiful moments that rapidly collected once I paused to notice them.
A particular barista at Peet’s Coffee. Each time I see her, I am enchanted by her freckles. She has a face of, in my opinion, true aesthetic beauty, and my fingers always itch to sketch her, to capture the delightful curves and details of her face.
The Bohemian strings hanging in the doorway between my friend’s kitchen and living room. Sitting on the couch, I watch the strings capture and refract the kitchen’s light, veiling the domestic scene of my two friends gathering ingredients and discussing what temperature to preheat the oven to.
Two girls sharing a bicycle, flying by me late at night as I walk to my dorm. The girl in front is clearly the owner of the bicycle, the one peddling and steering as her friend clings to her back and shrieks. They are both laughing. I catch a shimmer of their own delight as I walk past.
As a college student, I am distinctly conscious of how the decisions I make today impact what my life may look like years from now. Each moment sends ripples into the future. How I behave, who I become, what I will do, build into a looming question mark curved over each day. Yet amid such doubts, it is crucial I allow myself the small yet essential comfort of loving the world and its beauties wholeheartedly. Delight is not just to be found in a view of the Grand Canyon or standing at the top of Mt. Everest. Rather, as Gay illustrates, it is in the way the barista hands us our cups and the outfits of the people we pass on the street. If we discard delight, we risk losing the details with it. To do so would be to prioritize the half-finished sketch of a painting over the details that make up God’s masterpiece. What if, instead, we gently reorder our worries for tomorrow, and each day afterward, into curiosity about how the many ways of life and the love within it will reveal itself?
