Tools: Capacity for Delight

A client asks "When will I know I'm losing it?"

Oh boy. The fear of what is to come. If only it was that easy to know when you’re losing your mind. It’s not like you are functional one day and nonfunctional the next. It doesn’t work that way. It would almost be easier if it did.

My answer was usually something scary happens. You leave the house with the stove burner on. You drive to the store you always go to and somehow get lost. You need to pay a bill, but you can’t figure out how to move money from savings to checking. Two weeks later you get a notice that the bill is overdue.

It’s insidious.

I always try to flip that conversation.

Focus on living every single day to the fullest. Find joy and swim around in it. Swimming in delight brings gratitude.

I’ve talked before about Julia Cameron’s theory that quality of life is in proportion to the capacity for delight and how I created a Delight Monitor for Stuart that we did every so often and updated it when some of the things that brought him delight were no longer feasible and we replaced them with other things.

I actually did that for myself at the one year mark of his death and now that I am coming up on the two year mark I did it again. Here’s what it looked like a year ago.

The idea was simple. Write ten things that you love to do and check the box that indicates how often you get to do those things. Those check marks on sometimes, often and all the time on the scale indicate I was doing delightful things about half the time. Not bad for someone in the depths of grief, who often did not want to answer the phone.

A year later I have more checkmarks in the top three categories. What I found when I was doing this with Stu in the later stages, I could substitute new things he found joy in for the things he could no longer do. For example now I am kayaking less and rarely do my morning pages writing like I used to do, since I am working on the memoir most mornings instead. So I substituted some things in a new one for 2025.

Quality of life is the ultimate subjective experience that changes over time. We should all have a life full of delight. Especially the small things. Who knew how exhilarating it could be to find the exact piece of the jigsaw puzzle that completes the bridge over the river? I can’t put into words how I feel sitting next to my 11 year old granddaughter paining with watercolors. Or how satisfying it can be to volunteer to help someone that lives in your community.

The Capacity for Delight list goes on a cork board above my desk—a visual reminder of what makes life worth living.

Toward the end of Stuart’s journey there were not so many checkmarks on the right side of the chart, but we were very grateful for the ones that were there.