The scrapbook of simple pleasures is meant to serve as a reminder of the ways you can choose to perceive the smallest things around you with the sole goal of enjoyment, delight, and fulfillment.
As follows is my operationalization of simple pleasure derived from other texts and writers as well as from my own personal research.
Fiercely intimate is the word pleasure. We may think sex, guilt, and unabashed honesty in what we want and how it makes us feel good. The word carries the connotation of taboos, aren’t there so many other things we should be focusing on before we can even get to pleasure? When do we deserve pleasure? How should we constrain our access to it if we are overdoing it? Pleasure is oftentimes credited as a luxury, as something that can only exist if first class and impressive.
Writer, Fran Lebowitz considers pleasure in the sixth episode, “Hall of Records” in the Netflix series Pretend It's a City:
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“No. I have no guilty pleasures because pleasure never makes me feel guilty. I think it is unbelievable that there is such a phrase as “guilty pleasure.” In other words, unless your pleasure is killing people, but I mean…My pleasures are absolutely benign, by which I mean no one dies, okay? No one is molested, you know. And I think, No, I don’t feel guilty for having pleasure….I should feel guilty for what? For having two bowls of spaghetti? You know? For reading a mystery?”
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She goes on to unpack why the enjoyment of some form of a thing that is not high art is deemed with lower status, even a sense of shame. She counters this with a quick, but effective:
“Any fun you can have friend, go and have it.”
This essence of fun and harmlessness and the benign reminded me how pleasure can be surface-level and easy and free. And best of all, simple.
But what qualifies as simple? Before establishing my own understanding I turned to a poetic expert on themes of uncomplicated enjoyment: Ross Gay. His works The Book of Delights and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude meditate on rich satisfaction and appreciation that derive from the most basic of sources. The content and attitude he illustrates heavily informed my project in both subject and goal.
For the lens of this project, simplicity could be on account of any factor: low cost, high convenience, lack of uniqueness, wide availability, and unspecificity. Any of these abstractions of characteristics is the only prerequisite I needed to lump the pleasure into my study.
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This conceptualization of simple also came in part, from the collection of simple pleasures I gathered from those around me. I created a survey with one question: What is a simple pleasure in your life? Then 41 responses from friends, family, peers, and strangers flooded in. People wrote to me about the coffee they love drinking each morning, the urge to pick flowers everywhere they go, sitting beside their mother without needing to speak a word, driving on freshly paved roads, changing their bedsheets. People wrote two words and people wrote paragraphs. But all the responses conveyed a sense of mindlessness associated with these finite moments, experiences, and objects that they craved. Each response had a similar motif: the joy of familiarity, repetition, dependability.
However, there was also one distinct aspect of the pleasures that tended to vary from person to person: if these pleasures were contingent on others or if they were entirely solitary. While some pleasures were in fact about the escape from others, some were reliant on a specific individual’s involvement for the experience to be fully effective and satisfactory. Some still, were indifferent if people were around to bear witness, or even participate. Upon noticing this, I reflected on my own simple pleasure: letter writing, and how it uniquely landed right in the middle of this scale of alone or together. While writing a letter is something accomplished best when I have a space to myself, the actual function of the practice is inherently dependent on someone else’s involvement. This is the ongoing, living and breathing, part of this study in simple pleasure: how is the experience of pleasure affected by the participation of others?
As I drafted and edited and rewrote and consulted with mentors, the questions seemed contagious. How much pleasure can we really have all by ourselves? When someone else is a key component of the pleasure, do they feel the same way about the experience? Is there more at stake when others are involved? Is it riskier? Or is it all the more real and powerful when it is shared between others? While I have no answers, I am treating this scrapbook as a work in progress, I have many more pages and am finding that learning what is a pleasure to others, is quickly becoming a pleasure of my own.
Before engaging with my work it is important to understand that you will find two voices with each pleasure. In an effort to acknowledge the experiences and words of others, you will notice that the italicized text titling each piece is from the point of view of the character themselves. But to protect anonymity I have not differentiated which titles came from people who inspired the piece and which ones were born from my own thoughts, observations, and experiences.