“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays (in which Gay writes about all these difference experiences of delight)

                In the last few days I’ve been noticing (even more than I usually do) how much any way of thinking gets me into a way-of-thinking, an exercised muscle-shape of movement that makes the same movement easier moving forward.
                Three examples:  my partner and I have been playing Mice & Mystics with a friend. It’s a board game where players work together to lead characters, all mice, through different rooms of an adventurous castle, and last night after an evening of playing together my dreams were all castles and collaborative decisions, all negotiations of if-I-go-here-will-you-go-there. 
                Or again: I tend to snack when I’m trying to get myself to “keep working.” I think for me it’s part comfort, part an attempt to weave the joy of my senses back into sending emails. Then this summer I spent a month with my brother, who doesn’t snack much, and I found myself enjoying a little hum of hunger. I’m fortunate enough to have access to enough food, and supported in that privilege, there was a delight in this quickening want, this sense of not-yet-but-soon.
                Or again: I just picked back up a Starcraft, the kind of video game where you’re always trying to build something, collect something, fast fast, train more troops and order them across the map. And if I play for thirty minutes, I look away from my screen and I feel myself wanting to build something, collect something, move something, fast fast.
                Maybe all this is obvious. I’ve heard it said and seen it written lots of times (though yes, I have a special love for Gay’s framing). And maybe it’s in how I attend to this “obvious,” what I look for in it, that I develop this muscle for what I see.