Lessons From UNO During A Pandemic
We played UNO last night, just the two of us, for the first time in twenty years we figured. We drank our wine and relearned the rules and laughed a lot and had a blast remembering the good times we used to have sitting around the table, cards in hand, on campouts with our family and friends. I texted all three of my adult kids and told them we were doing it and they all felt the same.
I felt a rush of great gratitude for both the memories and the fact that I have someone here, someone with whom I can share this pandemic, in all its aspects. Our fears and uncertainties as well as our wins and triumphs of spirit and ongoing good health.
I also realized I don’t use the word gratitude much anymore in these posts, even when it comes up authentically, like with this card game
A little over a year ago, my good friend out west made this comment —
“I enjoyed this column. Small snippets of your life as it unfurls each day, with a hint toward the end about how these moments generate gratitude in you.
I like the notion that converting these moments into gratitude is an act of alchemy.
I wonder if you’d consider writing a column or two in which you did not use the word gratitude but showed us experiences in which that alchemical shift occurred and let the gratitude, unspoken, reveal itself to us.”
I replied —
“I really appreciated the comment you left after my last post. It resonated with me, though I’m not sure of all the reasons. Thank you for the idea. I did the post for tomorrow without using the word gratitude or thankful or gratefulness. It stirred up something, for sure. I’ve been a little afraid to not somehow mention gratitude, but I see your point and Karen (my wife) agrees, too. I’d like to communicate more about this.”
Coincidentally, one of our local friends had come to the same conclusion, and she seconded what he had written.
All this is to say that it’s becoming clear that writing a biweekly meditation like this is a two-way street. I put some words together and send them out into the world and then readers do the rest.
In his foreword to Andy Martin’s book With Child, Lee Child (creator of Jack Reacher and about whom the book was written) notes his “firm belief that writing and reading is a two-way street. First a book is written, then it is read, and only then does it exist. Readers create the story in their own heads, literally, at that point expending their own mental energy, burning their own calories. We agreed that the reader’ s sense of what the book is about is just as determinative as the writer’s.”
I hope that a quick two or three minute read can be enjoyable just as a piece of writing, at the end of which one either experiences gratitude or thinks about gratitude at least every Monday and Thursday when this comes out. I think it’s like a speed bump. You read it and you have to slow down briefly and have gratitude be what’s right in front of you.
UNO is a fun game and, yet, when I felt that gratitude I also felt vaguely guilty, because so many are suffering right now. I banished the thought quickly, because guilt is not a cousin of thankfulness.
Thank you for co-creating this GratiDude series with me.
