In January of this year, I read in the New York Times about creating Joy Notes in my phone’s calendar app. Every day at 8pm, I’m prompted to edit a Joy Note event I’ve scheduled in my phone and write a few words about what gave me joy that day. A month or so after starting this practice, I began listening to the audiobook called The Book of Delights by professor, poet, and essayist Ross Gay. Gay began writing short essays on his birthday where he chronicled the “delights” he encountered daily over the course of the next year. These short essays are a delight to listen to.

This got me thinking about the difference between joy and delight. While I think there’s some overlap, delight to me seems to be a noticing of pleasures or what I find pleasing, whereas joy seems to be more of an emotional response that can transcend our situation or circumstances. While both are important, I want to focus on noticing on a granular level what I find pleasing in my very ordinary life.

So Joy Notes have been renamed Daily Delights, and I will have a daily chronicle in my phone calendar of what delighted me each day in 2024. Here are a few of them so far:

Finding dairy-free chocolate chips at Trader Joe’s

Banana oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips

Being surprised with a matcha almond milk latte by my daughter

A long walk with the dogs

Being able to sleep in until almost 7am for three days straight!

Making a new recipe (tofu mushroom curry) that turned out so good

Fabric softener smell in the air on my walk from someone doing laundry

Seeing Nadia Bolz Weber in person in Pasadena

Getting the car transmission fixed under warranty

Holding a warm bowl of soup in my hands

A hot shower

Monarch butterflies on my walk

Here’s what I know: by watching throughout my day for what pleases me, I notice that actually, there are a lot of things that give me pleasure each day. And by paying attention on a granular level, I realize that delight is present each and every day.