They say that the poor man’s vacation is sitting on his front porch. But that can be a very pleasant place, and for a rich person, too.
One needn’t skedaddle hither and yon to find pleasure. Yet some people are addicted to travel, which can frequently ends up travail (the two words etymologically connected).
It’s proverbial to say, a cliché, but after seeing spectacular mountains, seascapes, you name it, sometimes on returning home, you find your own lawn and garden as fetching as anything you saw out in the big world beyond your usual ken.
A lady I know who had heavy-duty chemo eats basically sans tasting, with a few marvelous exceptions, such as the salt she sprinkles on her potatoes. Hearing about this small pleasure gives me one, too, knowing what a fight she’s put up just to have anything remotely like a normal life experience. Ditto of course for people suffering from “Long Covid.”
In a famed line the well-known architect Mies van der Rohe said less is more. Which seems true in many domains.
One of the joys of writing, for instance, is the process of squeezing out the water, whittling down, call it what you will. So that things end up clearer and more taut, and where again, less is more.
Even more paradoxically, diminutive can actually be big? Related again to our so-called small pleasures that can be more substantial than one might initially think? I do think there’s something to this emendation, this riff of sorts off van der Rohe’s old saw.
Ah, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” said the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the tiniest things, too, he might have added.
Why does one have to down five beers and be constantly consulting a smart phone in order to savor a sunset? Yet that’s increasingly where we’re at these days – i.e., people needing to distract themselves from the simple, the limited, the “dear freshness” Hopkins mentioned in his poem.
Can’t just watch a pro hockey game without oldies blaring before each face-off? This old fogie (who remembers Orr et al.) wonders why that’s so necessary. An organ intermittently thumping to instigate a collective cheer seems fine; but aged rock has just become too intrusive, it seems, too obligatory, and in supermarkets or pharmacies as well.
Such fare in a book store jars you into browsing less, not more. How can you really get lost in a book you’re trying to assess when you have to hear “Ticket to Ride” or “Mustang Sally” for the eight thousandth time?
This article’s starting to sound churlish and curmudgeonly to the author himself, and anything but the “small pleasure” I’d hoped it might provide! Our constant harping on politics can also do that, and in that department, I’m as guilty as anyone, too.
The Gershwins in one song called holding hands “nice work if you can get it,” and seemed to imply that that was an easy pleasure, an instinctive pleasure, and yes, a small one to procure. So often I see older people holding hands as they walk, but not invariably the young. Figuratively speaking, and going back to hockey, are the latter over-skating the puck? Forgetting what really matters?
Yes, there are small pleasures that are worth a good deal in this world. Cats can teach you that well, and so can dogs. Many animal lovers obviously know and feel this on a daily basis. Perhaps instead of saying “small pleasures” I should say “basic pleasures”? More or less the same, it seems.
“Keep it simple, stupid!” is another well-worn way of putting this. The great Count Basie was once floored by another piano player flying all over the map, thinking he himself should do that, too; instead, at the helm of his fine band, he went back to his simpler “plunka plunka,” as he called it.
In hockey (that sport again) the great Gordie Howe never looked like he was moving fast, yet he often had the puck. Less IS more? Over and over this truism hits me, not that I always follow my own advice. Meaning we could all use reminding from time to time re the “small pleasures”? For sure …