Savoring Simple Pleasures

I’m finishing up a housesit in Berkeley and typing this outside while birds chirp and the sun warms my face. A leaf just fell on my keyboard. Earlier today, a rainbow prism sparkled in my bedroom and lit up a nature scene on the wall so it seemed like the rainbow could have been part of the picture. I tried to capture it to no avail. Just a moment for me, I guess.

I forget it’s the small things, the pedestrian things that fill my heart to bursting. It’s not always the grand adventures or the big events that move me the most. It’s things like a small child crawling into my lap for a cuddle or unlikely friendships in the animal world. This brings to mind Mary Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day.” She writes:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

People use the last two lines of her poem frequently to talk about being brave, going after their dreams, checking off items on their bucket list, but in context, Oliver is asking, “What is your day-to-day life like?” She wants to know if we’re noticing the small things, the things that are often overlooked. She wants to know if we’re pleased with the buzz of the bumblebee, if we stop to watch the dancing shadows of trees as they sway in the wind.

There are many, many things I wish were different in my life and in the world around me. But a lot of those things are out of my hands. Instead of wishing for better days, I’m coming back to here and now, remembering my wild and precious life includes not only the clamor and the clangor of big events but also the quiet chirp of crickets and laughter among friends.

I dream of a world where we savor the simple pleasures. A world where we recognize the joy in the mundane. A world where we remember happiness can be found not only in winning an award or manifesting our dreams, but also in hugging a dear friend and playing with a small child.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.