Earlier this year, a group of friends asked Leelanau County writer Stephanie Mills to speak at their regular winter gathering, whose theme was “Pleasure, Presence, and Play.” It was some wild genius on their part to redirect our focus from the cruel spectacle unfolding in the nation’s capital, and other portents of collapse, and to turn our attention to conviviality, wrote Mills. (It was also fairly playful to ask a depressive pessimist to address such a lively theme.) The following essay is derived from that talk.