What if the most unselfish thing you could do was to pursue pleasure, to look for delight, to feel joy?

I'm Anne Strange Champs, and we are about to spend an entire hour making the case for the transformative power of joy, pleasure, and delight.

On today's episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge, let's make America

feel good again.

Wisconsin Public Radio

This is to the best of our knowledge.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

When was the last time you felt sheer, uncomplicated, authentic delight?

Here's poet Ross Gay.

Music poet Ross Gay.

I was at this writing residency working on this poem that I felt like I would never finish.

And I was walking back from town, sort of walking in a path between two farms and back to this castle where I was, it was actually a castle that we were staying in.

There are tons of sunflower fields in that region.

Acres and acres of sunflowers,

leaning toward the sky and

the linden trees, they just get hovering with bees

and they were singing to me and everything else was just heavenly.

All these wildflowers also kind of humming with bees, and I thought that this is delightful.

I realized, oh, I'm kind of theorizing what delight is in some kind of way,

which is to say, like, the edges of delight.

Why do I feel delight, or how it occurs, or what might be entailed in delight.

And I thought, oh, I should write a little essay about how delightful this is,

...