Tonight I was cutting up a big pile of potatoes for dinner (garlic, rosemary, olive oil, salt and pepper, a splash of shrub. Four hundred degrees in the oven until crispy. Delicious, with that vinegared edge). Some had purple skins, which had me excited — and then disappointed — when their insides didn’t match their outsides. Some were straight-up brownish on the outside with the expected yellow inside: reassuring, warm.
Truth be told, I was only really paying attention to the purple-skinned ones because I’m always delighted and amazed by the depth of purple their flesh can be. When I realized these weren't going to be all that, the whole thing became a task to get done.
And then — then! — there on my cutting board: PINK potato insides revealed! I am a tad pleased and a tad embarrassed by how much this pink potato delighted me. Like, a lot.
I think a fair bit about delight — how it feels, why it matters, and what expands or restricts our capacity for it. This potato experience had something to add to the mix.
Disappointment, in the case of the purple-skinned potato, seems to travel hand in hand with the expectation of delight. Expectation is, I think, different from a sense of possibility.
The former sets a bar for delight to meet — or miss. The latter feels like an open-door policy. Not a contract. More an orientation than a job description.
The average joe potato landed on my cutting board pretty freed up. No expectations. No sense of possibility, either — I barely noticed it in the mix. Our purple skinned friend was almost set up to fall from grace. But that third potato, with its slightly pink skin, struck a middle note. It didn’t set expectations, but it didn’t shut down the possibility of surprise, either. That quasi-hovering stance — I wonder if it’s something like the middle-distance focus you sometimes hear about in yoga classes — set the stage for delight.
Delight, simply because it was a pink potato.
What if this was how we wandered through the world? Primed not for greatness or novelty or spectacle — just for the quiet revelation of people and things being exactly what they are?
xo Jill