Small Joys

The world seems a little scary right now, doesn’t it? Wars, protests, political posturing, and the US on the cusp of collapse. The big news is a little eye-popping. Yet I woke up this morning thinking about how the smaller joys of life are too often overlooked.

We are told that the past is done and we should move on. Yet it’s in the past that many of our life lessons were presented to us, and remembering those can be very important indeed. Hence, todays’ story.

I used to participate in a small market once a week at an Inn that attracted travellers from all over. My products included my quilling art earrings. On this day, an older woman stood in front of my display admiring a pair of these earrings. She smiled at me and asked about them, and I chatted with her. But then she went and sat down at a picnic table under the pavilion that sheltered us. She kept looking up though during the hour or so she was sitting there chatting with others. And she got up and came over a couple of times when there was no one else at my display, and looked again at those earrings. She was clearly quite taken with them. Finally a younger woman joined her under the pavilion and the older woman almost immediately brought her daughter, as she turned out to be, over to my table to show her those earrings.

The joy in her eyes was clear. “I really like these,” she said simply.

The daughter just said, “but Mom, when would you wear them?”

The older woman held her ground in front of the earrings, and repeated her admiration of them, but the daughter just kept repeating, “but when would you wear them?” I was aghast. I was charging all of 15 dollars for those earrings, and the daughter was actually withholding her willingness to have her mom buy them… something that was apparently necessary.

For pity’s sake, I thought, even if she just wears them in her room dancing to music on the radio, they will bring her joy. She really likes them and it would bring her so much pleasure to have them. But the daughter held out longer than her mom could. Mom hung her head, all the joy gone from her eyes, and she wandered unhappily away, the victorious daughter right behind her.

Wow, I thought, the cheap young woman won. But what did she win? For a lousy 15 bucks she could have bought her mom some genuine joy, but she declined, so I guess there was no dent put in her inheritance that day.

We all have priorities. Too often the simple, little joys of life are not even on the list, much less at the top of it. Is it really any wonder the world is becoming so angry and mean? The little things are sometimes the big things and people need to hold little joys in higher regard, whether it’s stopping to smell those roses, listening to the birds sing, or springing for those beautiful earrings you have no formal plans to wear. I’ve always kind of regretted that I didn’t just give them to that woman. It probably would have started a whole “thing” with the daughter, but tough. It would have also put the joy back in that woman’s eyes. And that matters.