Radical Pleasure: Why I Keep a Good Things Jar

Athena Dixon on finding the right balance of what you want and what you need

The first time I can remember learning about magpie birds I was a kid. I’m thinking that it had to have been some fable I’d read in the copious number of books I’d consumed or maybe I picked up the knowledge via an anecdote an adult was using to teach me to be careful about what drew my attention. All that glitters isn’t gold, you know? You can have all the good intentions in the world, but if you pick the wrong person or make the wrong choice your life can change in an instant. What I remember is that I was told the birds were known to latch onto shiny objects and collect them. It didn’t matter if the material was good for protection or suitable for the nesting of eggs, if it was of interest the birds collected it. Somewhere in my head, I held a picture of a magpie nest glittering in the sun constructed of tinfoil and coins and metal. Beautiful, albeit wholly impractical.

What also stuck in my brain was that magpies were kind of dumb. What kind of animal was so distracted by something fancy that it couldn’t even take care of itself? How easy would they be to catch if all you had to do was flash a little bit of something their way and they’d swoop right in? I didn’t know at the time most of what I’d been told wasn’t true. Magpie nests are quite bland to be honest. And science says they actually tend to steer clear of unfamiliar objects and they’re smart, too. They can mimic human speech and can work in pairs.

Still, don’t be a magpie was supposed to be the lesson, I guess. Be mindful of what you build the foundation of your life upon. It should be solid, practical, and safe. I suppose I was to understand that collecting the shiny bits of life was dangerous. It was unpredictable because you never knew what you would get or whether or not it was something you could actually use. Safe is fine. Safe is best. But all these years later I’ve learned that safety mixed with joy is ideal.

Annually, as December wraps up, I pull my Good Things jar off of a shelf in my office. Over the last decade, the actual vessel has changed but what’s inside remains the same. Ticket stubs. Wristbands from concerts. Flower petals. Corks and caps. Tiny slips of paper littered with my handwriting. All the collected joy of the year leading up to that moment.

As the year winds down I usually spread the objects across my bed, a drink and my favorite Chinese food order somewhere within reach, and hold each object remembering the day, the event, or the feeling attached to each of these items I’ve squirreled away. Sometimes the memory is vivid and I time travel back to that very instant. Others, I have no idea why I’ve saved a particular object. Neither is more important than the other. What matters is that a past version of me was so happy, so joyous, that I wanted to remember. Whether or not I do doesn’t change that. The solidness of the paper or cork or plastic bobble in my hand is all that I need to know things have been good, are good, and can be good again.

By the time the clock hits midnight I’ve usually centered myself in those reminders. For a couple of years, I bagged up the items and wrote the date across the plastic in thick black marker. Then I tucked each year into a drawer, knowing if I ever needed to remember I could always just break the seal and time travel again. But as more and more time passed, the ritual did too. What was shiny and needed to be kept changed. My cataloging of my joy went from a bag to a handful to now nearly nothing left behind. I’m still a magpie of myself, of all the living that I do from day to day, but I collect and catalog in a variety of ways now.

Like going home to visit my parents. It’s a kind of time capsule. Of many things, really. My old bedroom and the sprawling backyard and all the familiar places now rapidly becoming ghosts. On my visits I tool down Main Street with my mom and visit my favorite secondhand shops and thrift stores, collecting little bits of shiny history and curiosity. I eat all the food that only tastes right within those square miles and I dig. I dig for pieces of me. Some days while I’m back in my old stomping grounds, I sit on the living room floor and shuffle through bags and boxes of photos. In the pictures I am not just young. In them I am curious in ways life, and my own decisions, have tamped down. College me slips by in a racy red dress. Childhood me stares down at a partially completed art project covered in tin foil. The me in my twenties stands at a mic on a stage with a headwrap balanced at the base of my neck, the shine of the spotlight reflecting off my glasses.

One thing is true about the photos. In each of them there is something glittering—in my hands or on my face or in my eyes. I’m vested in whatever joy that moment brought into my life. But instead of them being sealed into a jar waiting for the New Year to come, these items are scattered where I used to be, not where I am now. It's my job to gather them up and build something solid just as much as it is beautiful.

What started off as a coping mechanism during one of the darkest times of my life has become integral to how I navigate the world. This has spilled over from the physical Good Things jar to folders on my phone’s photo app named Writing Wins! and Photos of Joy where I keep digital reminders of my creative accomplishments and life’s happiest moments. All the shiny bits of my life to remind me of what could be when things seem bleak.

No matter what is actually true about the magpies, I’ve decided to focus on what I think those who made up the myths saw. There had to have been something that made people think that the birds collected the bright bits of their worlds and stored it away. Curiosity and levity, perhaps. That’s the magic. Amid the daily motion that made their lives move, the birds took the time to pay attention to joy and keep a little bit of it for themselves. I want that for myself and so I gather my joy with glee and routine, too.

I build in the shiny bits each day. In the fancy facewash in my bathroom and the comfortable sheets and the quiet moments where I let the sun collect on my skin and listen to the way the world moves outside my window. And I curate the big experiences, too. Those moments that far into the future I can look back at in wonder. All of this is a part of the nest I’ve built for myself—shiny and sturdy in equal measure. I’m sure there are myths about me, just like the magpies. About how I hold the parts of myself up to the light to see all the good I’ve hidden beneath the dull for so long. And about how even those less than bright parts that remain are still so very necessary to becoming the person I want to be and living the life I want to live.

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.