Capacity for delight

DELIGHT : Middle English: from Old French delitier (verb), delit (noun), from Latin delectare ‘to charm’, frequentative of delicere . The -gh- was added in the 16th century by association with light.

Meaning : a cause or source of great pleasure.

What is your Capacity for Delight?

I am working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and came across the phrase “capacity for delight” which made me stop and write the phrase again in the margin, and then take up my notebook and write it at the top of a fresh page.

Pondering …

How deep is your capacity for delight, do you put limits on it? If you do — why? What is the fear behind being fully open to all the delight the universe has to offer?

All this aligns with my daily goal — feeling good is the primary intention (from the Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte). We shouldn’t be afraid to chase the good feelings that are out there for us if we could only reach out and grasp them in our hands.

Do you fear that having more delight in your life will be a bad thing?

Do you fear that by allowing delight into your life you are therefore allowing the fear that it will be taken away from you?

That’s like refusing a delicious dish of ice cream because you’re afraid you’ll never have anything so delicious again.

And it all comes back around to the fact that we should allow for delight, we should be open to a full capacity of delight, we should cherish the single moments where delight enters our lives. Those little “moments of now” which nourish our souls in ways we often barely register consciously yet the cumulation of them makes our days so much happier. It reminds me of this quote;

“After all,” Anne had said to Marilla once, “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.” Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

So open up your capacity for delight, throw it wide open and receive all those moments, large and small, and see how big a difference it makes to your life.