Small Pleasures

 

Tuck loves heat.  He scurries to get into the warm spot you leave when you get up for tea, but his favourite place is the heating pad I sometimes leave on low after I've made my bed.  Lyra prefers sunshine and window sills.  Tuck loves head butts.  He will stretch out a paw to draw you to him, forehead to forehead, as if you belong to the same tribe.  Sometimes, when you turn to leave, out comes the paw to grasp you for one more.  His record is twelve head butts at a time.  Lyra loves to arrange himself in my arms like a baby looking up into my eyes.  Or he sits with his head on my breastbone, one paw on my neck, his head turned, and simply melts into my body.  Tuck sleeps on my hips; Lyra sleeps staring at me.  But their absolutely favourite place is together in the space between our pillows, with bouts of washing one another's faces during the night.  "I want to wash your face," Tuck will say, putting his paw on top of Lyra's head to hold it still.  "No.  I'm going to wash yours," Lyra will say as he eludes the paw and runs his tongue along Tuck's muzzle, chewing whiskers as he goes.  Tuck never has any whiskers.

Tuck and Lyra are cats eight and nine in my fifty-three year history with cat families, and most of them have had outsized pleasures.  Niagara, the daughter of my first cat, liked curling up in the bathroom sink and watching water drip on her.  But her all-time favourite thing was the root end of a radish, which she'd fling around in the bathtub.

Of course, they are cats, programmed for pleasure, so much so that they have a sound for expressing it.  But they are pets:  how did their desires become so individual?  In the dark, I know Lyra and Tuck by their desires as well as their differently-textured coats. When I sleep on my side, Tuck is the one who paws at the covers and waits for me to lift them so he can climb underneath and sleep happily with my arm around him as if he were my childhood teddy bear.  When my arm is on my pillow, Lyra rests his front paws there, his face inches from mine, and purrs. No.  My cats aren't pets.  They're companions, and it behooves me to understand the simple things that give them pleasure. 

How do you know who you are?  There is some argument that, Veronica O'Keene tells us in .A Sense of Self:  Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are, we are sometimes comprised of our neural circuitry and our hormones and neurotransmitters, which occasionally take us over.  Or are you the synaptic tangle of  memories traced in  your brain? Are you your consciousness at this moment, infused as it is with the precise details of where you are right now, reading a mystery while the smell of Earl Grey tea wafts towards you?  Are you the ineffable stuff that floats through your mind about the past, this moment, the future, an idea you have been toying with or reading about? The feelings of bliss that irradiate you or of trauma that just won't go away? Post-structuralists argued that we didn't really have our own identities, that we were "interpellated," shaped largely by social expectations. Though I don't entirely believe this, I taught post-structuralist theories because I thought we should consider the ways our contexts--from capitalism to gender roles--often quietly, even underhandedly, shape who we are.  Are we our stories, some complex relationship between our memories and the way we have configured them to create our narratives? Memories are never neutral; the context of our recall always tilts them slightly.  So maybe we're a conversation, then, between truth and desire or perspective? 

We are many selves at different times. Perhaps one portrait of each of us is sketched by our desires.  And I'm not going down the rabbit hole into the complicated warren of sexual desire; that's altogether too large a labyrinth for any single individual to encompass, which is why I simply lean into the cliche that love is love is love. I'm thinking about the simple desires that sparkle through our days.  "I need a cup of tea!" with the caveat at right this moment it has to be the mango green tea, not Earl Grey. "Do I have some chocolate around here somewhere?" "My head is stuffed full.  I need to go for a walk." "Where's spring? I need to go seed shopping!" Your need to hear a particular song. Yourquest for a good movie or binge-watching reruns of Succession. Your drive, right this moment, to rootle through your crafting drawers and find your knitting needles and make yet another scarf, just needing your fingers to move in this soothing, particular way.

Thinking of our desires as part of our self-portrait has an advantage:  we can then look at them more purposefully and query them.  

We want errant politicians and world leaders to do this, not simply to offer excuses for, say, economy-destroying tariffs, but to ask themselves "Why do I want this?" and to be genuinely curious. My first remembered instance of this came in 2003 when George W. Bush essentially said "Give me some gossip or threats I can use to invade Iraq.  I want to finish what Daddy started." I suspect that most wars, like the one in Ukraine, are started with the unexamined words "I want," without the recognition that they said something about the person with those desires, as well as about history and ideology and the economy. Trump wanted to bomb something with those big beautiful bombs the U.S. has, and Iran seemed like a good idea.  But why?  Why not diplomacy?  Because he wanted....

I've got desires that would benefit from asking why.  It's 9:20 in the morning, and I want chocolate.  Why?  Seriously, I cannot indulge every desire for chocolate I have; I already do it rather too much.  But I'm struggling with words, questioning each sentence, wondering if I've gone too far yet again with the ideas I share here.  Like, really, it's July 2 and I'm asking you to think about the little desires that sparkle through your day--or get  you in trouble.  In the case of chocolate, I'd like some comfort, and chocolate is my easiest avenue to comfort.  A lot of food is, really. 

The minimalist in me wants to say that we could interrogate our desires when, say, we're buying our twentieth pair of shoes or fourth white blouse or that new car or the book you have no place for on your shelves or the stack by your bed, which is already teetering.  If you can push it outside of you, you can challenge it and the planet will be happier.  Oh, and the book.  If it tells a story or elucidates an idea  you need to understand to become more human, buy it!  Maybe donate it to a little library when you're done.  But if it's going to sit on your shelves gathering dust as part of the self-portrait of who you want to be or be seen to be, give it a miss.  Or get it from the library and sheepishly return it unread.

In other words, if it's a thing you want, query it.  What is that desire telling you about yourself? Telling you about yourself this minute.  Maybe it's something you need to take care of, but in a different way.  With a conversation or a walk with your dog.

But if it's doing something, consider indulging it.  I have some admittedly odd desires, many of which circle around doing something that's small enough to be do-able.  Seriously, who else is driven to get up from her computer and go down to the piano to work on that waterfall of notes that hangs in the  middle of a Chopin Nocturne?  Nine completely unpredictable notes.  But it's still just nine notes.  If I play them often enough, I will get better at it, and when I'm working on a hard piece of writing I need a demonstrable accomplishment. At seventy-five, I've taken up fifteen-minute gardening.  I can't spend all Sunday morning in the garden, as I used to:  my knees and back won't take it.  But fifteen minutes weeding the vegetable garden is a tonic. There are microbes in the soil that raise serotonin levels in your brain, improving  your mood.  And when I'm done, I can see that my pole beans are going to get all the water and fertilizer I give them.  There's something peaceful and lovely about a weeded garden, something orderly that I need in my chaotic life. 

In the photograph above you see three sets of small pleasures.  Tuck, my black cat, and Lyra, my grey tuxedo tabby, love curling up in the afternoon.  Better yet, they love curling up on Mom's latest quilting project as she lays it out to see whether it's working.  The sunflower blocks are born of that desire to do something small and something bright.  They're entirely hand-pieced.  Last winter when I wasn't well, they saved my sanity because I could do just a few at a time, no matter how tired I was.

If planting a garden or planning a quilt or making a collage or writing a real letter to a friend is an intrinsic part of who you are, part of the sparkles that animate your life, celebrate it.  Flaunt it!  Indulge it. Find time for it.  Don't feel you need to justify it. It's you!