Gratitude In A Teacup
The last opportunity I would have had to publish these notes on the day after Christmas was in 2016. That was a Monday and this is Thursday, which are the two days I send these out. I got interested in what has happened since that post and what my preoccupations were at the time.
I was not yet a grandfather. Some friends and relatives living then are now dead. I had not had my shoulder replacement and was not yet eligible for Medicare. We had different tenants in our rental unit downstairs. Friends moved away, some very far. The home of my boyhood was still owned by our family. I did not yet have a real presence on Medium or Facebook. The gas explosions that wreaked such havoc here in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts hadn’t happened.
We had celebrated Christmas the same way we always do. We got up, had our coffee, made mimosas and ate smoked salmon on a bagel with an egg and avocado and watched It’s a Wonderful Life and cried at exactly the same place we did this year. Just to frame things a little bit, as a nation we were between POTUS forty four and forty five. That morning’s post was number seventy six and today’s is three hundred ninety six and some two hundred eight thousand words later. I had just had a colonoscopy and I’m coming up on another one in February, since I’m now on the three-year plan. The Earth has rotated on its axis 1095 times since.
How about you? What’s happened?
That morning I wrote, “I want to wake up every morning and have my earliest thoughts be of gratitude, like how I felt seeing the wintry extravagant sunrise today and hearing the hot water drizzle through the coffee grounds and how the baseboard heaters sound alive and murmuring and how I get to walk from room to room in the dark and I know all the secrets, like where the light switches are and where her thyroid pills are kept and where the keys are and how to avoid stubbing my toe and how much soy milk she likes in her coffee.”
I started doing this years ago because wiser people than I am said keeping a gratitude journal or working gratitude is a wise thing to do. So I began writing it with no end in mind other than having it be a daily discipline for a while. Some days it has been hard to keep going.
A lot of us have been taught to try hard (in spite of Yoda’s saying there is no try, there is only do or do not) and work hard at stuff. As true as that ethic may be, there are places where it trips us up, where trying too hard gets in the way. A friend of mine used to say to his striving, hardworking students “Don’t try hard, try easy.” I love that and it gets at the core of this Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life. Perhaps there is no need to work hard at it once the conditions have been set up. You can just let it happen. What are the conditions to be created? This is a work-in-progress, a discipline under development, but here’s the way it looks to this seeker on the day after Christmas 2019.
Annie Dillard wrote this in her introduction to Living By Fiction–
“This is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world’s meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction.”
I stole that for my own use. The teacup in this case is gratitude.
