The Gift of Being Beholden

An Invitation
By Clare Sigrist

When my son was a toddler, we made a rushed trip to Save-a-Lot to pick up cilantro for a meal I’d left behind, simmering, half complete, on the stove. As I went to pull out my credit card with my one free arm, the cashier told me the person before me had already paid. Just like that, the rush went out of me. Beholding the stubby bouquet limply resting on the black conveyor belt, I turned into something tender. The meal could wait. At that moment in my life, being cared for and noticed by a stranger like that was no small gift.

Poet and essayist Ross Gay calls it the gift of “being beholden to each other.” Soon, Gay will be coming to town to give the College of Wooster’s annual Peter Mortensen Lecture, and I am writing to invite you to attend. Each student from the incoming class of 2029 has received a copy of his book Inciting Joy.

This event, though, is bigger than our campus. I want to share it with you, because Gay has something vital to say about how we form community. He inventories the ways we are beholden to one another—playing a game of pick-up ball, hanging at the local skatepark, or simply showing up to a potluck, even when empty-handed. These ways of being together can refashion our world, Gay insists, if we let them.

As I prepared to discuss the book with my students this semester, I recalled that moment in Save-a-Lot. I had only lived in the community for two years by then. In the blink of an eye, two years have become a beloved nine, in no small part because of the community I have found here.

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Why Ross Gay Matters

As a poet, Gay is in the business of sustaining community. Inciting Joy offers a daily practice for orienting us toward what matters—at times mundane, but no less wondrous. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Gay seems to know what we need and gently supplies it, beckoning us to reimagine ethical life.

• In the pursuit of justice, he invites us to shift some energy from fighting against what we hate to moving toward what we love.
• In the pursuit of happiness, he asks us to see, with author Zadie Smith, that joy is integrally connected to “the intolerable”—pain we cannot possibly lift by ourselves.

“Joy is the light that emanates from us when we help each other carry our sorrows,” Gay writes. Discomfort, all too often, heralds joy. In defining a more complex joy, Gay directs our gaze toward what sorrow sows in our lives. In doing so, his essays inspire hope for the social despair of our times.

Throughout the book, Gay reminds us of our agency over public land, a theme familiar to the Wooster community where neighbors lead the restoration of the Barnes Preserve. Enjoyment of public spaces, he argues, offers gifts whose impact is difficult to measure—but essential for our survival.

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Event Details

Ross Gay: The Peter Mortensen Lecture
📅 Thursday, September 25
🕖 7:00 p.m.
📍 McGaw Chapel, The College of Wooster

Come be part of an evening that promises not just a lecture, but a moment of communion—a widening of vision and a reminder of the joy that emerges when we carry each other’s burdens.