I Have a Wish for You
To find the beautiful small moments when everything feels big.
Heads up: There are what could be considered spoilers for series 9 of Great British Baking Show, Schitt’s Creek, and Feel Good contained herein. ‘Spoilers’ is probably a stretch considering when all these things came out, but heads up in case that stretch will injure your back…or some metaphor related to stretching.
I have a wish for myself. And for all of you.
But first
lately, I’ve been rewatching the Great British Baking Show. (Let’s be honest. When am I not rewatching some kind of food competition show?) While it mostly functions as gentle background noise, I do find myself catching moments from time to time. Series 9, the 2018 season with finalists Kim-Joy, Ruby, and Rahul has one such moment. In episode 8, it’s ‘Danish Week’. The showstopper for that episode is a kagekone—a celebratory yeast-risen Danish pastry cake—a long, tough challenge mainly because of the required laminated dough. When it’s Kim-Joy’s turn for judging she takes a bit of a beating. Although her creation is beautiful, she didn’t approach the rising of the dough properly, leading to dry pastry. As she is listening to feedback, she starts to come apart, break down a little bit. And when she does, she turns to Briony for connection, for a bit of comfort. Briony, ever the empathic one, mouths to her, “It’s okay” while maintaining eye contact to reinforce her presence for Kim-Joy. It’s such a little moment but one of the most beautiful of the show, I think. It’s easy to miss if you are focused on the baking. It’s easy to forget there are real people on this light-hearted little baking show.
It feels a bit silly to look for beauty in times like these. Or, if not silly, it’s hard to find the beauty in times like these. Ugly is front and center. Ugly is a distraction tactic, hailed as a false idol and used to serve as reasoning for plowing forward with inhumanity. Beauty is hidden and if you find it, it feels irresponsible to spend too much time with it in light of everything else. In 100 Days of Creative Resistance, a series of emails from writers and creators curated by Writing Co-Lab, Hannah Lillith Assadi wrestles with this as well, eventually saying:
“An act of beauty is sometimes our last weapon. Clinging to the beautiful, our only resistance.”
Leaning into moments of beauty and, in the same vein, into the absorption of acts of creativity can feel like a distraction. Sometimes it is. Necessary distraction. But what if.
It’s been a while since I’ve revisited Schitt’s Creek but even years out of having watched a single episode, there is a scene that sticks with me. In ‘General Store,’ episode 7 of season 3, David has decided to apply for the lease of a vacant store in town and start a business. He runs this idea by Moira (the heart of my heart Catherine O’Hara) who, at first, kind-of encourages him to go forward. Then, as a town council member, she rejects his application for the thing she just encouraged him to do. Rightfully confused, David goes to talk to his mother. In the course of their conversation, it comes up that David used to run galleries in New York. He has run businesses before so what is the problem? Moira asks him who he thinks bought all his art. “My patrons,” he says incredulously. Then, there is a moment where Moira looks down. We all sit in her small silence. It’s obvious she is wrestling with the decision of what to tell him next. There is pain on either side of what she says. So the question becomes whether to continue to protect him and set him up for failure or to tell the truth, shatter his image of himself and, in doing so, possibly save him from making a mistake. The commonality between both options is that it doesn’t change the fact that there is no financial safety net for David. Not this time around. It’s another complication but not the main one.
After a tense moment, she asks: “And who do you think bought all your patrons?”
While not necessarily the most inspiring, this moment and her final question illustrates, in its own way, a small moment of humanity and connection.
I haven’t felt very beautiful lately. Inside outside upside down. Left right center. From any angle. You choose. Some of that comes from spending a lot of time alone with myself. I start to lose sight of my own beautiful, small moments of humanity in favor of savoring those outside of me. Catching those moments outside of me, remembering those moments, proves to myself that I can still see them, that I’m paying attention to more than just the internal storm.
There is something inherent in most beautiful, small moments of humanity, I think. Creation. Creativity. The want to create something, the reaction to the creation of something. It takes someone doing, making, or trying something before divine moments of recognition and connection can happen.
In both the Great British Baking Show and Schitt’s Creek, that’s the case. Kim-Joy is reacting to feedback she is getting regarding something she made, worked for hours on, something she put her passion into. Schitt’s Creek has a few angles in this vein—David is reacting to what appears to be a lack of support for his idea, a fledgling creation. Moira is bogged down the heaviness of the anxiety that David’s creation won’t turn out to be what he wants it to be. But, ultimately, we wouldn’t have this quiet moment between the two of them, or any of the other beautiful moments in the show, if Dan Levy hadn’t created the show in the first place.
If you are paying attention, these kind of moments aren’t so few and far between. Obviously, the things we watch, listen to, consume are full of them. I always have some cycling through my head. There is that moment in Feel Good where, in desperation, Mae calls her mother from a toilet stall. Her mother, Linda, answers the phone with the familiar antagonism of their relationship and immediately softens when she realizes her child is in trouble and needs her. (Lisa Kudrow is *chef’s kiss* there. And a lot of places.) There is the entrance of the strings in Games for Two by Ryan Teague that always reminds me of a moment in one of the stagings of These Mistakes. (Yes, that is indeed a play I wrote.) There is Beyonce saying if you aren’t careful, she’s ‘colder than Titanic waters.’ There is everyone’s favorite poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith. There is “And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.” from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. There are all your favorite quotes and moments and chords that live in your experience.
But those moments don’t happen without creation. Those little moments of humanity and connection are fostered by creativity. Often, it’s a mess to get to those moments. It feels like a lonely road through detritus to stumble upon connection. It’s hard. It’s a fight. We’re made to feel like there is nothing to see in what the powers that be determine to be ‘trash.’ We’re made to feel if we do see something worthwhile in the mess, we’re the only ones to see it. We’re made to feel that when there is so much mess, there is no room for creativity.
Beauty emerges from the mess.
In 2018, arts consultant Beth Pickens released a book called Your Art Will Save Your Life.1 It was smack dab in our first go-around with this and is a bit of a guidebook to creating art in the midst of great upheaval, confusion, and tragedy. Throughout the short book, she reiterates how much the world needs your creative energy and your art, especially when it feels frivolous. Her thesis statement is best encapsulated in her ‘Dear Artist’ letter that is the preface of the book:
“You are not alone. You have what you need for your life, for art, and for justice. Stay with your creative path, trust your vision, and know that your contributions will matter to someone else.”
Around the same time I remembered the heart of Beth’s book, Austin Kleon posted this quote from someone Seattle people will likely be familiar with, Paul Constant:
“If you love something that somebody does—some art, some words, some sounds—you tell them that you love it. You tell everyone how much you love it, repeatedly and enthusiastically. Don’t save your appreciation for later, or worry about wearing people out with your passion. Because the happy truth is this: If a piece of art truly moves you, you will never, ever run out of new adjectives to express how much you love it. Getting to love someone’s art is one of the very finest parts of being alive.”
So, after all these examples and quotes from other people, here is my wish for you:
I wish you small moments of beauty. I wish you quick flashes of creativity. I wish you fleeting but meaningful instances of connection.
None of these things have to be big. There is so much big in the world right now. Too much big. Everyone is dealing with the overarching big and many are also dealing with the more personal big. Let them be small. We need the small moments for a bit of relief. Let them be quiet, modest, and sufficiently uplifting.
Here’s where I could remind us all that big things are made up of a lot of small things. That big changes are made up of a lot of small actions. But, actually, I don’t want to do that. Well, I don’t want to end on that anyway.
What I want to end on is this:
Don’t worry about if any particularly small things are going to add up to something big. You can’t see that from here so you don’t need to catalog it. Look for, grasp, and put small moments in all your pockets. Make small moments for others to find. Hop from small moment to small moment, living with it only as long as its ephemerality. Glance both ways as you cross the streets of small moments. Give someone else’s small moments love. Create something. Create something small, share it, and forget you created it.
Forget it because someone else, somewhere will never forget it.
That’s how we keep moving forward.
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