Soundtrack to this post.
There is a line in Pulp Fiction I keep coming back to, and it is not one of the famous ones. No royale with cheese, no foot massages, no Ezekiel 25:17. Mia Wallace sits back down at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, looks at the table, and says:
“Don’t you love that? When you come back from the bathroom and find your food waiting for you.”
That is it. She says it, and the scene carries on. Nobody really answers her. Within a few minutes of screen time she will be flat on a carpet with a needle going into her chest, and Vincent is already spending most of his energy on not doing something catastrophically stupid. The whole sequence is wound tight. And in the middle of it, she notices the food.
I think that is why the line lodged in me hard enough to end up in my commonplace book. It is a completely undramatic observation, made by someone in a very dramatic film, and it happens to be true. You do love that. Everybody loves that. It costs nothing, it changes nothing, and it is a small, dependable pleasure available to more or less anyone who has ever got up from a table and come back to it.
Noticing is a skill, not a mood
The thing about small mercies is that they are not rare. They are just quiet. They do not announce themselves, they do not send a notification, and nothing in the world is set up to bring them to your attention. Which means whether you get them or not is almost entirely down to whether you happen to be paying attention at the time.
The kettle already boiled when you walk into the kitchen. The bin already out. A green light at the bottom of the hill when you have never once had a green light at the bottom of that hill. Washing that came in dry, in Paisley, in July. An email you had been dreading answered before you had to chase it. The good parking space, right there, on a Saturday.
None of that is luck exactly. Or rather, the luck is evenly distributed and the noticing is not. Mia is not lucky that her food arrived. Food arriving is what restaurants do. She is just the sort of person who registers it as a pleasure instead of as a logistics update.
A few lines above her in my commonplace book, Epictetus says you become what you give your attention to. I do not think it is a coincidence that they ended up on the same page. If attention is the raw material, then the question of what you point it at stops being a personality quirk and starts being something closer to a practice. The days I have paid attention to the small good things have not been objectively better days. They have just been better days to have been inside of.
What this is not
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this idea I have no time for at all.
“Count your blessings” has done a lot of heavy lifting for people who would rather you did not ask difficult questions. Be grateful for what you have. Look on the bright side. Cheer up, it could be worse. Told to the right person at the wrong moment, it is not wisdom, it is a way of changing the subject. Noticing that the kettle is boiled does not fix a housing system, or a hospital waiting list, or a wage that has not moved in three years, and anyone who suggests otherwise is usually selling something.
So this is not that. Small mercies are not compensation and they are not an argument for accepting things as they are. If anything, they run the other way. Nobody sustains a long argument with the world from a position of permanent grimness. You need somewhere to put your feet down. The people I know who have kept going the longest, on the things that matter and take decades, are almost all people who are still capable of being delighted by something small and stupid at half past seven on a Tuesday morning.
Mia’s line works because it is not consolation. She is not saying the food makes up for anything. She is just, briefly, in a scene that is about to go very badly wrong, glad about her dinner.
The commonplace book bit
This is more or less what the commonplace book is for. Most of what is on that page is heavier: Le Guin on capitalism, Illich on tools, Sagan on a society that depends on science it does not understand. Big ideas that I keep near me because I want to keep arguing with them.
And then Mia Wallace, on the pleasure of a table you left and came back to.
She earns her place. Every so often you need reminding that the point of all the other quotes, the whole business of paying attention to power and who decides and who bears the cost, is a world with more small good things in it and more people with the spare capacity to notice them. That is what it is all in service of. Not a better argument. A boiled kettle, and someone glad to find it.
Don’t you love that?