The Stubborn Act of Collecting Joy
In the unbearable stretching on of life here, joy often slips out of my awareness.
It’s ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, and I’m vacuuming the balcony. Well, it’s almost ten, which I think is a late enough time to vacuum. The smoke of the neighbor’s morning cigarette from the unit below drifts up as I push the vacuum back and forth across the concrete.
In addition to wondering if the time to vacuum outside is sociably acceptable, I also wonder if it’s weird to be vacuuming concrete to begin with. Should I be sweeping it instead? But then a man with a large plastic bag stuffed with bread rips down the street on his motorbike making an awful noise that surpasses the drone of my dinky second-hand vacuum, and I don’t feel so bad.
As a foreigner, the low thrum of cultural stress always vibrates in the background. Is this normal? Am I being offensive? Do they think I’m weird?
But back to why I’m vacuuming: there are lentils. Everywhere.
If you have spent any time in online parenting spaces over the last few years, you know about Pinterest’s infatuation with The Sensory Bin™. Sensory bins are touted as the answer to all things. And if you really love your kid, then you will dye rice and beans and spaghetti multiple colors and dump it all in a Tupperware container. Hand your kid some cups and spoons, and they’ll be entertained for hours, possibly forever.
What these Pinterest blogs don’t tell you, though, is that there is always an aftermath.
The zeal of an opportunistic toddler whose parent turned her back to check the chicken—for, I swear, twenty seconds—had proudly dumped the contents of the lentil sensory bin across the balcony floor.
I had no one to blame but myself for the carnage that layered the ground. I fell into the trap that promised hours of independent play. And my daughter is three. How fun is it to hear the pleasing rattle of hundreds of little uncooked legumes spill across the concrete, rolling and bouncing everywhere, while the grownup is distracted by dinner? A toddler’s dream.
I ignored the Great Lentil Spill for a while, chalking up the mess to living in the same house as a child. What can one do? I thought to myself as I flicked lentils off the bottom of my bare foot. Good thing she’s cute, I’d chuckle, sweeping up the orange pellets that now started to appear on the kitchen floor. But the lentils kept multiplying. The more I swept and wiped and dumped, the more they materialized. I found lentils high and low, in every crevice, in every room of our house.1
And then the ants. It was inevitable, I know. I walked out of my bedroom one morning, heading to the coffee machine in the kitchen, when I spotted a dark swarm on the hallway floor. Half disgusted and half morbidly curious, I checked on the ants each time I walked past. Every time I headed down the hallway that morning, they had made progress with a single orange lentil, working together to scoot it toward a crack in the wall that led to their home.
I would have been impressed had I not been sickened by the state of our home. Ants can withstand fifty times their weight after all, which is like a second grader lifting a car. Amazing, but not in my own house.
It was time for the lentils and the sensory bin to go. So here I am, vacuuming my balcony on a weekday morning, reconsidering all the decisions that led up to this moment.
My daughter is eating a cherry and folded into one of the garden chairs, red juice running down her chin. Her legs are draped over the arm of the chair. She looks so much less like a baby and so much more like a preschooler.
If you’ve been following my writing for some time, you’ll know we are not where we want to be in life. We are limping toward another year of living an ocean away from family. Our plans are still at the mercy of ever-changing government mandates. We've had to share more milestones and celebrations over video calls than we've ever dreamed.
Things keep fracturing into a thousand tiny pieces. Sorrow, if not lurking under the couch or behind the T.V., feels just around the corner. And my daughter keeps getting bigger and longer and less baby-like, and that dream of wholeness doesn’t feel any closer.
I dump a pile of lentils out of a single sandal. They clatter to the ground and disperse to all four corners of the balcony. The sticky sweet cherry juice dribbles onto my daughter’s shirt, and a smile spreads across her face. She bears all her teeth, her eyes scrunched shut, and her face angled toward the sky. Her legs, hanging loose, kick and kick.
“Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience—ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.”
-Brené Brown
The cherries came from a tree we found on a walk to the park. The tree’s foliage was so full it spilled over the stone wall and above the sidewalk, making our walk nearly impassable. My daughter and I stopped to admire the bursts of red on the branches and relish in the shade the cherry tree provided—a welcome reprieve from the heat.
“Go ahead and have some.” An older woman was bent over a homemade broom twisted together with twigs and string. “I see you two all the time.” She motioned to the tree while she swept her terrace free of dead leaves.
So we timidly picked a handful of cherries as she crooned out a series of blessings commonly aimed at small children. The moment’s sweetness felt spun together like a ribbon of silk while we collected the fruit. Soft and easy. We ate some of the cherries on our walk and reserved the rest for a snack on the balcony.
I hip-check the side table now and suck up more lentils lying underneath it with the vacuum. But I keep glancing at my daughter’s face, joyful and open, and craned toward the sky, eating the gifted cherries. The sunflowers in the garden next door do the same thing. Their golden faces follow the sun's path as it sweeps across the clear blue heavens.
Brené Brown once wrote, “Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience—ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.”2
There is something very striking about the image of “joy, collected over time,” like picking wildflowers along a path—a daisy here, a clover there, more and more beauty in your hands until you come home with an entire bouquet to place on your kitchen table. A little bit of magic in this wretched world.
In the unbearable stretching on of life here, joy often slips out of my awareness. It feels shapeless, like elusive feathers streaming down or burnt paper disintegrating in my hands, something I’m quick to brush away.
Sorrow, though, feels solid, its sharp edges pushing into my palms and forearms, the weight bearing down so heavily I’m forced to shift my grip. It’s the sadness of what I’m missing, for dreams unfulfilled, for the years-long prayers unanswered, and for all of the brokenness in this world. The heavy and hard? Now that I can pick up and add to my collection.
I lay the vacuum down and pull up a chair next to my daughter. In the corner of my eye, I see more lentils I had missed hiding behind the kiddie pool. But then the black and white magpies chatter in the olive trees below. My next door neighbor pours tea, and the delicate tinkling of a spoon against glass rings out across the courtyard. I ignore the lentils and instead steal a cherry from the bowl in my daughter’s lap and toss it into my mouth.
Poet Jack Gilbert wrote that we must not risk delight. “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world,” he wrote.3
Cherries and summer and the beautiful mess growing children leave in their wake. The generosity of strangers. The incredible phenomenon of how strong ants are and how wildflowers are open to all types of weather and the delicious shade of a fruit tree. All of it.
Call it joy. Call it delight. Or beauty. Or magic. Collected bit by bit, these are what make sense in a senseless world. These are what need to be noticed and plucked from the dirt and held in our bruised and tired hands. These are what cannot be ignored.
Tangentially related: I once had a boss who had six kids and he joked that if he ever wrote a parenting memoir, the working title would be Why is My Sock Wet? And honestly, I’d offer my suggestion of Why Are There Lentils in the Bathroom?
The whole poem is worth reading: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/readinginthedark/c-dale-young
Sarah, I am so glad to have found my way here too! This piece is so sweet - and a scene oft repeated in my home. I once thought a sensory bin of rainbow rice would be blissful- that was two months ago and every now and again I find a brightly colored grain of rice somewhere in the house! It really is the collection of joy, of beauty that fills my heart and keeps me going on tough days.