Looking In A Secret Mirror
These Notes From The GratiDude have always had one simple aim. We work on looking at life through the lens of what we have already, rather than what we lack. And that is not a task for the faint of heart, it turns out. I need to be looking through that lens today. Our current situation is a pain in the ass and focusing on it is understandable. No one knows for how many weeks or even months or years this will continue.
Yet, richness and abundance are everywhere if I have but eyes to see. Sometimes I don’t see it because I’m in some kind of contracted inner space. I know that, but it is the reaching for it, at least, that is the essence of this practice.
I’m a healthy, fit, sixty-seven year old, surrounded by awesome people who love me, and I can read, walk, go to work, drive, live lustily, pay bills, eat veggies fresh from our own garden, breathe deeply, run without pain and eat pretty much whenever I want to. I always, always have fresh clean water to drink and a hot shower and a clean safe bed and keys to a house where all my stuff is. My stomach hurts from laughing quite often. And right now there’s a sparrow on the roof ridge of the neighbor’s house, backlit by the eastern dawn and there’s the purple uproar of the Morning Glories out back and the Rose of Sharon still flowing and flowering and showering us with lavender gifts. I’m a blessed man, I can see that.
I can sense some guilt when thinking about others who do not have what we have and how much they might be suffering during these difficult months. I wonder what story still casts its shadow and creates that. Maybe knowing others don’t have what we have is a way to be clearer about the blessings and the grace. In other words, to stay away from guilt like I caused it somehow, but still use it to help focus on what I do have. In a memorable aphorism from college, one professor said guilt is like carrying around a turd in a knapsack.
At times it feels like someone is there, maybe that “brooding critic in the corner” to whom Admiral Byrd referred in Alone, the account of his 1934 solo in Antarctica that almost cost him his life because of carbon monoxide poisoning. That brooding critic is still alive and active and making the rounds and sitting on peoples’ shoulders. He gets around a lot.
He suggests words to me and comparisons, the thieves of contentment. You’ll never grab the brass ring, he chides. At sixty seven this is as good as you’re gonna be. He offers thoughts on how much I suck as father, son, brother, husband, writer. He notes that I probably drink too much wine and eat too many damn cashews. He reminds me that my gratitude work isn’t helping me very much right now. “So there. QED, Mr.GratiDude. The pandemic is getting to you, too.” No matter how much you know, the world is humbling.
I have found useful a sentiment of the late George Leonard, Aikido sensei and author of Mastery, among many other books. He said the way for a student to be, after getting a black belt, is to be on the mat the next day and “look in his secret mirror and see the newest student in the class, eager for knowledge and willing to play the fool.”
Whom do you see in your secret mirror?
