Come With Me! Look!
It’s very freeing to know that I don’t have to write deathless sentences for the ages in this blog post. What’s on me is to write ones that twice a week remind people to just look around and be thankful for what they already have in their life. If a well-turned sentence pleasing to the eye helps with that endeavor, so much the better, but it’s about gratitude first and foremost.
So if any one receives this in their inbox and reads whatever is written here and stops briefly and ponders what they’re grateful for, I have done the job I set out to do. Gratitude is only about one thing at its simplest. It is an acknowledgement of the abundance we already have in our lives. It’s better to read a great sentence then a shitty one but a shitty one that leads people towards more gratitude is a good thing.
I was thinking of my college literature professor, Beatrice Batson, who used to welcome us to class saying “Come with me, students! Come with me” and then you just felt like you were impoverished if you hadn’t explored Milton or John Donne. I’d like to channel Beatrice and through me have her say to you all “Come with me, come with me. Look at all the amazing things in your life that are right under foot.”
Mark Knopfler, virtuoso guitarist and front man for Dire Straits, then solo performer and songwriter for years, learned from Bob Dylan that you can write songs about anything. After I heard him say that in an interview, I decided I could certainly take that on myself if those two guys practiced it.
More specifically to our point in this blog series, you can take Knopfler’s advice and also relate anything to gratitude. That’s the corollary I would add, a notion that animates me pretty much every day when I get up and wonder what I might see through the lens of gratitude. It doesn’t have to be anything major or sophisticated. It’s just “what do you see?”
I found myself wondering what I might have been writing about and interested in the last time February 4th fell on a Monday. I looked back in my journal and that was 2013, the day after the Saints beat the Niners in the Super bowl.
On Saturday February 2, 2013, there was this–
Irish writer James Joyce’s 131st birthday (Dublin 1882). Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris and publisher of Ulysses, said “he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him, he told me that he had never met a bore…. If he arrived in a taxi, he wouldn’t get out until the driver had finished what he was saying. Joyce himself fascinated everybody, no one could resist his charm.”
Sounds like that experiment on an airplane in which the most fascinating person was the one who asked all the questions. I aspire to that and am grateful for the model.
The James Joyce Ramble (10K race every April in Dedham, MA) played a substantial role in my life. It seduced me back into running. In fact, I had never been in any event, any formal, official race, until my first Ramble, since high school track days. I did it because of a customer’s T-shirt and I only noticed that because it mentioned James Joyce, a literary hero of mine. I feel thankful for that.
On Monday February 4, 2013 I wrote–
I’m reminded that yesterday was the anniversary of the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in a plane crash in 1959 and that Waylon Jennings could have been on that plane, but didn’t fly at the last minute. I also thought about how my dad was dead just over a month later. Quite a momentous year was 1959.
Now it’s Monday February 4, 2019, and the Super Bowl was again last night and the Patriots beat the Rams for their sixth title and, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “the world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
What will you notice today?
