Reflections

I'm delighted that the selection committee chose Inciting Joy. Gay’s stories and reflections challenge us to be open to moments of joy, even when we may be struggling, and to allow these moments to help sustain us. I look forward to reading this work with our students, faculty, and staff, and to the many conversations about what it means to belong at BU. Together, let us find joy during a time of rapid change.

What I appreciate the most about Inciting Joy is its refusal to define joy too narrowly. Ross Gay finds it in gardening, friendships, in music and memory, in moments of celebration and moments of sorrow. His essays suggest that joy is less a destination than a way of paying attention. It’s a practice of noticing what sustains us and connects us to one another. For me, Gay’s reflections on gardening are especially resonant. A garden asks us to invest in a future we cannot fully control, to nurture growth we may never entirely witness, and to find meaning in the act of tending itself. College is not unlike that. It is a season of planting and becoming. Like a well-tended garden, a university community flourishes when people invest in one another, remain open to surprise and create space for growth. My hope is that every reader finds something in these pages that takes root. The collection is wide enough to meet us in different places, and generous enough to leave us changed in ways we may not immediately recognize.

Throughout Inciting Joy, Ross Gay offers a wide-ranging invitation to pay attention — to all the different ways that joy moves through our lives, woven in and around and mixed up in the moments of chaos, sadness, bliss, and change. His exploration is grounded in the power of observing with gratitude the small moments of beauty, laughter, and community that are so easy to let slip by unnoticed. Many times while reading, I was struck by a specific example or nuanced story, but perhaps most so in the sixth incitement, when Gay writes of a friend who makes him laugh with complete abandon, and he offers the reader a quiet and earnest wish: 'I hope you have a friend like Dave.' That line stayed with me long after I closed the book, and I found myself wanting to extend it to every student who will read these essays. I hope our students will find reflections of meaningful experiences in their own lives as they read: that they'll find the incitement of joy through laughter with friends they make here at BU and that they'll discover it in the 'orchard' of our campus by giving back and trying something new with strangers-turned-community. Joy, Gay reminds us, is not something reserved for the easy days. It is something to be tended, noticed, and incited, in the big moments and the small ones, and sometimes most powerfully in the ones that catch you entirely off guard.