Familiar Refrains
“Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”
John Adams wrote these words in a letter to his wife Abigail dated April 26, 1777 and we were reminded of them after watching the entire seven-part miniseries about him last week (originally shown on HBO in 2008). They make me think of the long chains of events, the A to Bs which we’ve forgotten about or can’t see any more, often leading to the good things we have. They have the flavor of that final scene on the bridge in Saving Private Ryan when he is admonished, after all the sacrifices made to get him safely out of harm’s way, to “earn this.”
Also grateful for another rewatch of the movie Lincoln before Thanksgiving and the chance to view the long shadow its central figure has cast in history. It seemed appropriate, since the holiday is his legacy. I was just as emotional, just as moved this time as the first. I remember coming out of the theater in which we originally viewed the film and hearing a woman say to her female companion “Am I the only one crying?” I assured her that she was not.
All of this is to say that I sit here with a thankful heart this morning for such moving moments in my life, when it’s hard to summon words with which to even start communicating. It’s fairly easy to feel gratitude in such times, if difficult to express.
Yet sometimes I also sit here in the a.m. and, while writing myself into a grateful day, am hyper aware of how banal most of life seems. OK, enough about the blue sky and enough about how good the coffee is and the morning hug with my bride and the rectangular little electronic genie phone whose wish is my command and what the temp is and whose birthday it is and the lovely spray of flowers in the vase on the table in the sunlight and whatever movie we watched last night while drinking whatever wine and how great it is to be warm and have keys to a house and how great the song Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen is and how great to have a job three miles from here and all these friends and the beauty of the river and saying yes to everything and how I had a good night of sleep and the fridge full of food and two cars that work and great tenants and access to resources and books to read and ideas to be inspired by.
There are some familiar quotidian refrains that’s for damn sure. I confess that some days I actually do have some resistance, asking what more is there to see or say.
Then I was wondering the other day if I would pass the test. If I got a diagnosis of lung cancer, like my non-smoking friend just got. I mean, would I be grateful, would I practice this discipline when truly dark days come? I had coffee with him and told him how much I admired his attitude and his gratitude even with this in his face.
It’s one thing to practice when most everything is pretty much OK and it’s easy to list and ponder the great things in one’s life. I haven’t shied away from whatever has been tough over these years of writing here. I have just worked hard not to place any undue emphasis or focus on them. The blessings list is so much larger than a few complaints. I have seen that time and time again. I suppose that even the classifying into “blessing” and “complaints” is an artificial one.
Maybe the depth of this would be recognizing that everything, and I mean everything, is part of the gratitude work, the inquiry into it. I’m probably a ways off from that. But I hope this practice will sustain you or me in some rudimentary sense, even through tears and loss.
