Jeremiah Tolbert

Ordinary Joy Our most pro­found joy is often expe­ri­enced dur­ing ordi­nary moments. What was one of your most joy­ful ordi­nary moments this year?

More Reverb10 today.  I had fun with these orig­i­nally, as I could take them seri­ously, and then I started hav­ing fun with them because I couldn’t take them very seri­ously at all, and finally, I am still not able to take them very seri­ously but I am hav­ing a hard time fig­ur­ing out ways to have fun with them.

Ordinary joy is the kind of thing we take for granted, yes, and is prob­a­bly due a bit of med­i­ta­tion, but because of that, remem­ber­ing par­tic­u­lar instances of it becomes dif­fi­cult.  Life is full of lit­tle joy­ful moments, and thank­fully so.  It’s also full of a thou­sand pains and mis­eries which are equally dif­fi­cult to recall once they’ve past. 

Memory for me is a strange thing.  It’s like a squirm­ing beast within my head of which I have lit­tle con­trol.  Big things, their rough out­lines at least, remain vis­i­ble and recallable.  But lit­tle things only come back to me acci­den­tally, tan­gen­tially.  I’ll smell some­thing and be trans­ported wholly back to a day in my child­hood when I was smelling some­thing sim­i­lar.  Voluntarily recall­ing that day would be impos­si­ble.  My mem­ory has a mind of its own, sometimes.

I can­not tell you what I had for break­fast a week ago today (although I could guess, given that my break­fasts are not exactly var­ied), and I can­not tell you what lit­tle ordi­nary joys I had in the past year.  All I can say is, yes, I had them, and I cer­tainly enjoyed them, and I will enjoy the ones to come.  But they are ordi­nary and not really deserv­ing of any kind of pedestal.  The pedestals are reserved for mem­o­ries that deserve it.  And there’s not much I could change about that even if I wanted to.

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Tags: reverb10