Unlike Ross Gay, who wrote The Book of Delights, his book of essayettes, in long hand, I typed this review of the book into the Microsoft Surface given to me delightfully by Freshworks when I joined the ‘love-your-software kudumba’ three years back. (Kudumba means family and it is Freshworks’ mission to make software people love to use.)
And while I agree with Ross on writing by hand being “a surprising and utter delight” I have taken as much delight, if not more, in sifting through his daily musings of whatever caught his fancy—and punching in these words on the laptop.
First, a little explanation of why this review and then I’ll share some delightful nuggets from the book, peppered (or sweetened, if sweet is your thing) with my own comments.
Ever since Freshworks chose ‘Delight made easy’ as our tagline, no mention of the word ‘delight’ escapes my attention. Plus, given that we have a thriving Freshworks Book Circle community of readers in our midst, I just grabbed Ross’s book from a bookstore on a recent visit as soon as the title caught my eye.
A few years back, on his forty-second birthday, Ross Gay, a professor of English at Indiana University and an award-winning poet-author, began the endeavor of writing one short essay each day about “something delightful.” By his own admission, he cheated some days and let them pass happily without writing. To use his terminology, he took delight in “blowing it off.”
But when he does get down to writing his thoughts and observations on any topic under the sun—varying from praying mantis and high-five from strangers to coffee without the saucer and airplane rituals—the result is a delight contagion spreading through whoever reads them. After an eyeful of reading, you are bound to change how you pay attention to the goings on in life around you. His delightful observations make you thoughtful and cheerful in equal measure.
The Book of Delights excels in noticing the joyous minutiae of existence and the connections that human beings make within their species as well as their surrounding abundance of thriving, pulsating life.
In his very first essayette (My Birthday, Kinda), Ross observed, among other things, a fly land on the handle of a cup of coffee. And it took him no time to tease the delight out of the spectacle. This is how he puts it: “A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say: ‘Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Coffee or tea lovers clutching their cuppas would approve.
In another piece (Hummingbird), he writes: “Once I saw a hummingbird perusing the red impatiens outside my building at school, and I walked slowly over to the planting, plucked one, and held it in my outstretched hand perfectly still, long enough that at least one student walking my way crossed the street so as not to get too close to me, until the blur of light did in fact dip its face into the meager sweet in my hand.”
How lucky and delightful the experience of feeding “the blur of light” (lovely expression!) out of one’s hand, I thought as I read the above passage (I must confess that my own experience of once trying to feed a squirrel out of my hand went awry, though the memory is still delightful and dear to me: the squirrel bit my hand before making off with the morsel).
One of the key motifs in Ross’s book is that he always seems to be looking out for a nod, an acknowledgment, even a physical touch symbolizing kindness or appreciation in fellow human beings. Let me pull out two episodes that I particularly found noteworthy.
Once Ross was working on his computer in a coffee shop with his headphones on and swaying to a new De La Soul record when he found a teenage girl standing next to him, hand raised. And just as he looked up, confused, and pulled back his headphones, the girl said (presumptively): “Working on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!”
Ross high-fived with delight.
Then, in the essayette titled Tap Tap, he writes: “I take it as no small gesture of solidarity and, more to the point, love, or, even more to the point, tenderness, when the brother working as a flight attendant…walking backward in front of the cart, after putting my seltzer on my tray table, said, ‘There you go, man,’ and tapped my arm twice, tap, tap.”
Another observation I could immediately relate to, having seen it at multiple train and bus stations across India, came in the piece titled Sharing a Bag. In Ross’s words: “I adore it when I see two people…sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles.”
The way Ross further describes how the two people usually lug the bag makes you break into a spontaneous chuckle, followed by a nod of human understanding: “It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering, as the uninitiated, or the impatient, will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack, which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter—the good and sole rhythms we might swear we live by—to the one on the other side of the sack.”
As an aside, aren’t we all in the corporate world trying to modulate our pace, collaborating to carry and deliver the bag of goods (or goodies)?
The Book of Delights is a treasure trove of joyous observations, especially about the daily human experience and our shared bonds.
But before I bid you adieu, here’s one more tidbit which, I’m delighted to say, has a direct correlation with customer experience (though I believe one can find CX inspiration in a lot of Ross’s observations.)
Now, Ross doesn’t like to have a saucer with his coffee—the cup alone will do, thank you very much. So, in Coffee without the Saucer, he talks about how he once had to “rescue” his short Americano that was “wobbling precariously on the little saucer” by placing it squarely on the table. “Phew. And the spoon clanging the whole time. For Pete’s sake.” (You can almost feel the disgruntlement on his face.)
And then he recalls a delightful experience of “a saucerless administration of a small coffee drink” at an espresso place. He loves the place not only for the “very fine small coffee drinks they make” but also for the curiosity of one barista in particular, who “studies my face as I indulge.”
“No saucer, right, she observed after one visit. I love her.”
Delight is made easy when you deliver what people love: whether coffee or software.
(This post was written for and first appeared on Freshworks.com.)
