Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us are finding ourselves with lots of extra down time. According to my social media scrolls, it appears my friends are using the excess hours to become more avid runners, perfect their baking skills or bury their noses in heaps of novels. I’m a worker bee by nature, so this whole downtime thing has me stumped and a little down in the dumps. I am wired to seek progress, efficiency and organization. But with all this time at home away from my office, absent from expectations and deadlines, I have felt a lack of purpose. So, I have a new ambition- to become more disciplined in delight. It sounds selfish doesn’t it? I sure hope so. I will be treating the things that bring me joy, satisfaction and delight as my new assignment and lifework.
On the surface, the rigor of finding delight might sound simple. But it requires tuning out all the regular noise, turning inward and lingering there for a bit. I’ve identified that some moments of delight surprise me and occur unexpectedly. Once the surge of elation hits me, I feel an instinct to want to write it down. But the true discipline is, of course, to simply relish in it and see where the delight takes me. Delight can last a while, like long walks in the mornings or late nights next to my husband and a crackling fire at the lakehouse. Delight can be a brief blip in time like sipping a perfectly sweetened cup of iced tea, or discovering a new playlist on Spotify. When I’m soaking up sunshine on the brightly hued, grass-stained quilt Mamaw Rachel gifted me in high school, delight comes easily and swiftly.
I long for this pandemic to end and I look forward to returning to the normal disciplines of my regular work. And I trust my new discipline in delight will become strong and live much longer than this virus ever could.