Turn on Your Delight Radar
Guided by Krista
Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.
Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.
Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.
You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
Transcript
[music]
Krista Tippett: Do you have a delight radar? Do you wear it all the time?
Carry that question around. Bring what you observe and what you feel as you ponder it into your journaling or your other writing, your silence, your meditation, your prayer. Make an active practice of tending joy and cultivating delight in the most granular of experiences. What is pleasant and sweet and tender? What brings flashes of light into your day? And how does that practice shift other feelings and actions?
A special treat, this time, just to take this particular teaching to its true depths. Here is Ross Gay reading from his Book of Delights about the surprising other side of cultivating joy — that when we let joy in, we also learn more fully to bear our sorrows as part of the essential wilderness that we are and that we share with all others.
Ross Gay: “Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
“And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
“Is sorrow the true wild?
“And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?
“For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
“What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
“I’m saying: What if that is joy?”
[music]
